What Cabinet Refacing Costs in Oakville
Most Oakville kitchens land between $8,000 and $18,000. What moves a quote inside that range is the number of doors, not the size of the room.
What most Oakville kitchens land at
Between $8,000 and $18,000 for a complete refacing, and that range is wide because kitchens are.
The low end is a small kitchen with a modest door count in a standard painted finish. The top end is a large kitchen with a high count, a premium material, and boxes that need more preparation than average. Most sit in the middle.
That range is for the refacing itself — new doors and drawer fronts made to your openings, new hinges, and your existing boxes sprayed in 2K polyurethane. What it does not include is the work that sometimes travels with it, which is set out further down.
Why we price by the door, not the square foot
Refacing is priced on the number of doors and drawer fronts, not on the floor area of the room, and that is not an accounting quirk. It is what the work actually consists of.
Every front is handled individually. It comes off, it is measured, a new one is made to that opening, and it is finished, hung and adjusted. Twenty-six fronts is twenty-six of those sequences whether they sit in a large kitchen or a cramped one.
So a galley with twelve wide doors costs less than a U-shape with twenty-six narrow ones, even though a floor plan would call them the same size. Anyone quoting refacing by the square foot is using a proxy for the thing that drives the cost rather than the thing itself.
The three layers of a quote
A refacing price comes together in three parts, and we show them separately so you can see what each one is doing.
- The count. Every door and every drawer front, because each is handled, prepped, finished and hung. This is usually the largest single layer.
- The days. A day rate against how long your kitchen takes on site, which follows from how many boxes there are, what condition they are in, and how awkward the room is to contain and work around. A kitchen whose boxes have been polished for twenty years takes longer to prepare than one that has not.
- The material. A painted MDF shaker in a standard colour sits at one end. Rift-cut hardwood with a custom stain sits at the other. The difference between them across a whole kitchen is significant.
What sits outside the base price
Four things are quoted as their own lines rather than folded into the total.
- Hardware and soft-close hinges. Your existing hinges can stay if they are sound, and most people upgrade once they have felt the difference.
- Millwork. Crown, valances, filler pieces and end panels.
- Counters. Quartz scheduled into the same installation week, so the kitchen goes out of use once rather than twice.
- Cabinet modifications. Reconfiguring a run, altering an opening, building around a new appliance.
Itemising them is the point. A single bundled figure hides which part is which, and it makes taking something out a negotiation rather than a decision.
What it saves against replacing
Full replacement typically starts around $25,000 and commonly runs $30,000 to $40,000 once demolition, new boxes, installation and wall repair are counted. Against a like-for-like refacing, the saving is roughly $17,000 to $22,000.
The saving is labour and disposal as much as materials. Nothing is demolished, nothing goes in a skip, no trades wait on each other, and the walls, plumbing and wiring are never disturbed because the boxes never come out.
That is the case for refacing when the boxes are sound. When they are not, the saving is not a saving at all — it is money spent on the wrong problem, and we would rather say so before a deposit than after one.
What you get for it
A price only means something next to what it buys. Refacing replaces the doors, the drawer fronts and the hinges, and sprays the boxes you already have in 2K polyurethane rather than wrapping them. Reading what refacing replaces and what it leaves alone is worth doing before comparing quotes from anywhere, because the word covers genuinely different jobs at different shops — some of them wrap the boxes rather than spraying them — and the cheapest number on a page is not always buying the same work.
The number that actually matters
A refacing quote is only expensive or cheap relative to the alternative, and the alternative is tearing the kitchen out. That comparison covers more than the price — the boxes, the walls, the plumbing and the weeks you spend without a kitchen all differ. Seeing how the two options compare on money and on weeks side by side is the fastest way to know whether the saving is worth what you give up to get it.
Questions
Common questions
- How much does cabinet refacing cost in Oakville?
- Most kitchens land between $8,000 and $18,000. Where yours falls depends on the number of doors and drawer fronts, the condition of the boxes, and the material you choose — not on the floor area of the room.
- Why can two kitchens the same size cost different amounts?
- Because the count differs. A galley with twelve wide doors is less work than a U-shape with twenty-six narrow ones, even though the floor area is identical. Every front is handled individually — taken off, prepped, sprayed, hung and adjusted.
- Is the quote fixed?
- Yes. Send wide photographs of every run of cabinet and a written price comes back inside 24 hours, and it is not revised afterwards. Around ninety-nine percent of our quotes are done this way, and a visit is for design decisions rather than pricing.
- What is not included in the base price?
- Hardware, soft-close hinges, millwork, counters and cabinet modifications are quoted as their own lines rather than folded in. That is deliberate — it means you can remove a line instead of renegotiating a total.
Want a real number for your kitchen?
Send wide photographs of each run of cabinet. The written quote comes back inside 24 hours and does not change afterwards.
Free in-home consultation · no obligation