Kitchen Cabinet Painting, Refinishing or Replacement: Which Is Your Best Option?

If you walk into your kitchen and the first words out of your mouth are, “We really need to do something with these cabinets,” it is time to start looking at your options.

Fortunately, there are several good options, depending on the condition of the cabinets and your desires for the aesthetics of your kitchen. Franklin Painting of Farmington, CT, would like to tell you about three of these options.

First, What Don’t You Like About The Kitchen Cabinets In Their Current State?

• The color is all wrong
• The previous owners painted over beautiful wood, but I want beautiful wood
• The cabinets are old-fashioned, and I want modern
• There’s not enough cabinet space

There are solutions for all these issues.

Kitchen Cabinet Painting

If the current paint color is no longer acceptable, a kitchen cabinet paint job is a relatively easy and inexpensive way to solve the problem. The solution is even easier if you just paint the outside-facing parts of the cabinets and leave the insides the way they are.

Painting the inside of cabinets can take five times as long as painting the outside because of all the shelves, angles and framing pieces. If you don’t care about the insides, leave them alone.

Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing

If you do not want paint at all but rather natural wood, the solution is cabinet refinishing. This can be a sizeable job, but it’s definitely doable by you or a crew of cabinet refinishers. And it’s a lot cheaper than building new cabinets.

With kitchen cabinet refinishing, you will strip off the paint and then prepare the surfaces. Surface prep includes filling in holes, making repairs and thorough cleaning. When the surfaces are ready, you will apply a stain that brings out the natural grain of the wood and presents the look you are after. (As with painting, you do not necessarily have to strip and finish the insides.)

Kitchen Cabinet Replacement

Homeowners have spent a lot of money replacing their kitchen cabinets when all they needed to do was paint or refinish them. But in certain cases, cabinets do need to be replaced.

If the current design no longer works for your kitchen or if you desperately need more cabinet space, it is time to look at a kitchen cabinet replacement or addition.

When you are upgrading for more cabinet space, you can tear out the old cabinets and install larger cabinets. You can also build a smaller cabinet arrangement on a bare wall elsewhere in the kitchen.

If it’s a redesign you are after, consider just replacing the cabinet doors and hardware. Those two items can make a significant improvement in appearance.

If you decide that a full kitchen cabinet replacement is the right option, talk with a few remodeling contractors and get several estimates and opinions before signing anything.

The Bottom Line In All This

When you work with a paint contractor, cabinet refinisher or cabinet builder, you do not want them coming into your home and saying, “Okay, here is what you need to do. Let’s get to work.” Rather, you want them to talk with you and find out specifically what you desire and then tell you how (and if) they can make that happen.

Franklin Painting does not build new kitchen cabinets, but we do paint and refinish them to give your kitchen a brand-new level of beauty and charm. You tell us what you want, we will tell you how we can do it.

Speak with a painting expert by phone or through our contact form.