I am so happy to writing this post. I was able to create a whole new kitchen for a major fraction of the cost of replacing my kitchen cabinet doors.
If you don't want to replace your doors - here's how I painted our last kitchen cabinets.
If you are wondering how I transformed the peninsula to this dark walnut look - click here!
Kitchen cabinet refacing might be for you if you:
1. Like your current kitchen layout
2. Your cabinets are in good/decent condition
3. You want to give your kitchen a face lift without having to completely gut it
If both these apply, then you're a great candidate to simply replace all of your doors and drawer fronts! Here's how to do it:
Measure Measure Measure
The first thing you need to do is figure out your current cabinet overlay. There are tons of videos online about how to do this but I found this one the most helpful:
Side note: this is not the company I ended up ordering my new cabinet doors from - but they do have some really helpful resources on their site to figure out how to order yours
I found out my cabinet doors were a half inch overlay - which is pretty standard especially if you have 90s cabinets like mine were. I decided to keep my existing overlay (that just means how much my cabinets overlay the opening for the cabinet door).
Once that was figured you, you need to measure for your new cabinet doors. To do this, you measure the opening of your door and then add your overlay to that. So for me since I had a half inch overlay that means adding 1 inch to my width measurement and 1 inch to my length measurement, and doing this for all the door openings. Again, I found this video very helpful for that:
One other thing to note is that you want your cabinet doors to be uniform. For example - you wouldn't want a set of doors that open to be off length or width wise from each other. So if one opening is off 1/8" from the other one length wise, I just picked one of those measurements and stuck with it to keep everything looking even. You also want to make sure you leave 1/8" for double doors to open. Here's an image to help show what I'm talking about!
Order your doors!
I ordered my doors from cabinetdoor.store I highly recommend them! After I placed my order - they reached out to me to make sure that I ordered correctly since I ordered some doors pre-painted and some unfinished. The doors came a week early, and the finish was beautiful! Here is their online order form:
This is for the Breckenridge door and is the style I choose!
All you have to do is enter the width/height of your door. Choose your wood species - if you're painting them/having them painted you'll want to choose Paint Grade Maple w/ HDF panel. Your frame width (that's just the frame around the cabinet door). I choose the smallest width (2 1/4). The finish - you can order them unfinished, primed, or painted. They have a bunch of Benjamin Moore color options or you can pay them $500 to do a custom color. I decided to pick from the pre-painted option and choose Revere Pewter 90%. I highly recommend getting them painted if you can afford it! The factory finish is so nice and definitely worth it in my opinion. Then hinge boring - I choose 3MM which I believe is standard for hinges. I did press in hinges which meant I had to use a mallet to press in my hinges, but screw on is a good option too! You can also order soft close hinges directly from them, which is what I did.
Here is a look at a sample order form for one door:
Once you place your order - you do have to wait 8 weeks for the order to arrive, but it's worth it. I got my order actually within 7 weeks, so a little early.
Choose Paint/Paint your cabinet boxes
Once your door arrive - it's time to color match the paint. You can go to a paint store and bring one of the door/drawer fronts with you and have that color matched - or go with the color name/percentage and buy paint that way. I personally wanted to ensure it was super close to what I ordered - so after my doors arrived I went to Sherwin Williams and bought in one of my drawer fronts and they were able to color match the cabinet drawer front - they were also able to help me match the sheen.
Make sure you get nice paint! I can't stress enough that paint makes a difference. I purchased Sherwin Williams Emerald paint in satin finish. It goes on super smooth and has self leveling properties.
I also recommend using a foam roller to paint your cabinet boxes. This ensures a super smooth finish. These Whizz rollers are my personal favorite.
I primed my doors with Zinsser Bulls Eye primer. Here's what my kitchen looked like with the first coat of primer!
And here is after a coat of paint!
Installing the new doors
After everything is painted it's time to install the new doors! I found this to be the most exciting part because everything was finally coming together! I used a cabinet door mounting jig which made sure all my doors were installed at the same level.
Your clip it to the cabinet box with a clamp, and then your door can rest on the ledge while you screw it into your cabinet box! It's a pretty painless process. And here is the finished product:
Let me know if you have any questions about the process!
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