Everything You Need to Know about Cabinet Redooring

Is cabinet redooring an effective way to update your kitchen quickly and less expensively than ripping out your cabinets and starting over? Let’s look at the process, options, benefits, and pricing of redooring.

Cabinet redooring means replacing the doors and drawer fronts of existing cabinets. The cabinet boxes stay in place and the outsides are left as they are or refreshed with paint to match. Redooring is like refacing, but in refacing the cabinet boxes are covered in veneer (not paint) to match the new doors.

Kitchen Tune-Up offers a wide range of door styles for redooring. We can use laminate or wood, contemporary, transitional, or traditional styles, and any color in the rainbow. Redooring is best for painted or laminated looks, as we don’t re-stain the existing cabinet boxes (if you want a new wood stain look then refacing is your better path). 

The best cabinet candidates for redooring are wood stained or painted cabinets that you want to change to a painted style (or keep a similar color but change the style). Laminate cabinets can also be good candidates, especially if they run wall to wall without exposed ends. Frameless cabinets are also good candidates for redooring (these are cabinets where you see the edges of the cabinet box when you open the door compared to face frame cabinets that have a decorative frame attached to the opening of the box that you see when you open the door). Sometimes we combine refacing and redooring in the same kitchen – we look at what will provide the best result and sometimes we’ll use refacing panels on an island, but we’ll paint the rest of the cabinet boxes. Kitchen Tune-Up’s solutions are tailored to each kitchen’s individual characteristics and potential. 

Once you’ve selected your new doors, we measure each opening for your new custom made doors and drawer fronts. In the process of redooring, we can convert doors to drawers, make functional improvements like adding a trash pull-out and roll-out trays, and even add new cabinetry. If you have older cabinets with exposed hinges on the outside of the cabinets, you’ll see a lot less of the cabinet frame with your new doors and drawer fronts. The new doors will be larger than the old ones and the hinges will be on the inside of the cabinets.

 A redooring job typically takes Kitchen Tune-Up two to five days to complete depending on the kitchen’s size and any other improvements and updates. We remove the old doors and drawer fronts, make any layout or functional changes, paint the outside and inner lips of the cabinet boxes, and then install the new doors with soft-close hinges and new decorative hardware. We can usually apply new drawer fronts to your old drawer boxes, or we can replace those and upgrade those to soft-close as well. 

Redooring is typically about half the cost of new cabinetry. While you can change your appliances, counters, and backsplashes with a redooring project, you don’t have to make all those updates at the same time the way you would in a traditional remodel. We have many clients who previously updated their counters and now want to refresh the look of their cabinets to match. We help our clients find the right color and style doors to work with their home and anything in their kitchen that’s staying, like the counters. 

At Kitchen Tune-Up we want to help you make the most of your home. We would love the opportunity to see your kitchen, show you door and hardware samples, and create a plan to update and upgrade your space to meet your needs. Contact us today for a free design appointment and estimate.