Cabinet guide
Cabinet refinishing, refacing or replacing: which one does your Ottawa kitchen need?
Three words for three different jobs, and quotes for all three land in the same inbox. Here is what each one changes, what it leaves alone, and how to tell which one your kitchen actually needs.
Short answer. Refinishing keeps your doors, drawer fronts and boxes and puts a new finish on them. Refacing keeps the boxes and swaps the doors for new ones. Replacing takes out the whole kitchen. The choice comes down to your existing cabinet boxes: if they are sound, refinishing or refacing will do it, and only the door style separates the two. If the boxes are failing, or the layout itself is the problem, replacing is the honest answer.
You can usually settle this yourself in about five minutes with the checks further down. This guide is about the choice, not the numbers. What cabinet painting costs in Ottawa and what moves the price is covered in our cost to paint kitchen cabinets in Ottawa guide.
Refinishing, sometimes called cabinet painting
Your doors, drawer fronts and boxes stay exactly where they are. They come off, get cleaned, sanded and primed, and get a new finish. Nothing structural changes. The kitchen keeps its layout, its door style and its hardware unless you choose otherwise. What changes is the colour and the surface. This is the work we do, and our cabinet painting and refinishing page covers how it runs step by step.
Refacing
The boxes stay, and the doors and drawer fronts are replaced with new ones. A matching veneer or laminate is applied to the visible face frames so the boxes read as new. You get a different door style, which refinishing cannot give you, and you keep the layout and the carcasses. Refacing is a different trade from painting. It involves ordering new doors, so it carries a lead time on the parts and a supplier decision about style and material.
Replacing
Everything goes: doors, drawers and boxes. This is the only one of the three that lets you change the layout, move a sink, add an island or fix a kitchen whose carcasses are actually failing. It is also demolition, which means the kitchen is out of use for a stretch, and it usually pulls countertops, backsplash and sometimes flooring into the project with it.
What each one changes, and what it leaves alone
| Refinishing | Refacing | Replacing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cabinet boxes | Kept, refinished in place | Kept, visible faces covered to match | Removed and replaced |
| Doors and drawer fronts | Kept and refinished | Replaced with new ones | Replaced with new ones |
| Door style | Stays the same | Can change | Can change |
| Layout | Stays the same | Stays the same | Can change |
| Parts to order | None | New doors, so a lead time applies | Full cabinetry, so a longer lead time applies |
| Kitchen out of use | Largely usable throughout | Largely usable throughout | Out of use for a stretch |
How to tell which one you need
Start with the boxes. Open a cabinet and press on the shelf. Look at the bottom of the sink cabinet for swelling or soft spots from a slow leak. Check whether the doors still close square and whether the hinges have pulled out of the wood. Boxes that are sound and square leave both refinishing and refacing open to you. Boxes that are swollen, delaminating or sagging under load point at replacement, and no finish will hide it.
Then ask whether the layout is wrong. If the kitchen works and only looks dated, refinishing and refacing both solve it. If the problem is where things are rather than what colour they are, no amount of finish work fixes that, and replacing is the honest answer.
Then think about how long you can live without the room. Refinishing and refacing keep the kitchen largely usable. Replacing does not. That difference matters more to most households than the finish does.
Finally, the material question. Solid wood and MDF take paint well. Laminate and thermofoil are slick factory surfaces and are less forgiving, though they can often still be painted with the right cleaning and a bonding primer. Our cabinet refinishing and repainting page answers that one directly.
What refinishing actually involves
The short version, because the cabinet painting in Ottawa page has the long one. Doors and drawers come off and get labelled so every piece goes back where it belongs. Kitchen cabinets carry years of cooking grease, so they get degreased and sanded before anything else happens. A bonding primer goes on next, and that primer is the part that decides whether the edges chip a year later. Then the finish coats, then reassembly, then a walkthrough with you.
The reason to know this is that it tells you what to ask a quote about. A cabinet quote that does not mention degreasing or a bonding primer is quoting a different job from one that does.
What to ask before you book any of the three
- Does the quote include the cabinet boxes, or only the doors and drawer fronts?
- What primer is going on, and why that one?
- Are the doors finished in place or taken away, and how long does that leave the kitchen out of action?
- How long between coats, and what is the total timeline?
- What happens to the hardware, and are the holes reused or filled?
- Is the estimate itemized, so it can be compared line by line against another quote?
If your cabinet boxes are sound, we give a free written estimate, itemized so you can compare it line by line against a refacing or replacement quote. We work across Ottawa and Gatineau.
Refinishing, refacing and replacing: common questions
Refinishing keeps your existing doors and drawer fronts and puts a new finish on them. Refacing replaces those doors and drawer fronts with new ones and covers the visible face frames to match. Both keep the cabinet boxes and the layout. The practical difference is that refacing can change the door style and refinishing cannot, and refinishing has no parts to order.
It depends entirely on whether you want a different door. If the doors you have are a style you still like and the only problem is the colour or a tired finish, refinishing gets you there without new parts. If the doors themselves are the thing you dislike, refinishing will not fix that no matter how good the finish is, and refacing is the option that will.
Two honest ones. First, the layout and the door style stay exactly as they are, so if either of those is the real problem, painting is the wrong tool. Second, the finish is only as good as the preparation underneath it, and cabinets are the hardest surface in the house to prepare because of the grease. A cabinet finish that was rushed at the cleaning and priming stage chips at the edges and around the handles, which are the two places you touch every day.
You can, and it is the most common reason a home cabinet project fails within a year. Sanding is not about removing the old finish, it is about giving the primer something to grip. Skipping it on a slick, grease-soaked factory surface leaves the new paint sitting on top rather than gripping anything, and it comes off on your fingernails at the door edges.
No. Refinishing changes the colour and the surface of the doors you already have. Changing the shape or profile of a door means a new door, which is refacing or replacing. If you like your doors and dislike your colour, refinishing is the direct answer to that.