Cabinet Refacing vs Replacement in Oakville
One keeps your cabinet boxes and changes everything you see. The other takes the whole kitchen out. The right answer is decided by the boxes, not by taste.
The two jobs, plainly
Refacing replaces the doors, the drawer fronts and the hinges, and sprays the cabinet boxes you already have in 2K polyurethane. Everything structural stays.
Replacement takes the boxes out — every box, every shelf, into a skip — and puts new cabinetry in. The layout can change, because nothing is being kept.
The word people usually reach for is "renovation", and it hides which of these they mean. The difference is not a matter of degree. One is a finishing job with new fronts; the other is a construction project.
What happens to your boxes
This is the whole decision, and it is a question about condition rather than age.
A cabinet box is structure — the box fixed to the wall that everything hangs off. A door is surface. When the boxes are square, dry, firmly fixed and not swollen at the base, they are doing their job perfectly well, and taking them out means paying to dispose of the part that was still fine.
When they have failed, nothing hung on the front rescues them. A door screwed to a box that is moving will not stay square. We look at the boxes before anything else for this reason, and it is the most common ground on which we tell somebody refacing is not for them.
Time without a kitchen
The timelines are not close, and this is the part that decides it for a lot of households.
Refacing puts your kitchen out of action for about five days. Your doors are made off site over roughly four weeks first, and during those weeks nothing has happened at your house at all — the kitchen works exactly as it did. The disruption is one week at the end.
Replacement runs three to six weeks, and the room is a building site for all of it. Walls usually need patching where the old cabinetry came off. Plumbing and electrical sometimes need adjusting. There is no version where you keep using the room.
What replacement gets you that refacing cannot
Three things, and they are worth being straight about because they are real.
- A different layout. Moving the sink, changing where the fridge sits, opening a wall. Refacing cannot do any of it.
- Different cabinet sizes. Deeper drawers, a taller pantry, a wider run — these are the boxes themselves, so they only change if the boxes change.
- A fresh start on failed boxes. Where the boxes have gone, replacement is not the expensive option. It is the only one.
What neither option changes
Worth saying, because it catches people who expected more from replacement than it delivers.
Neither job moves a wall, and neither makes the room bigger. Replacement lets the cabinetry inside the footprint be rearranged; it does not change the footprint. Households hoping the kitchen will feel less cramped afterwards are sometimes disappointed by a full replacement for exactly the reason they would have been disappointed by refacing.
Neither job fixes a floor, a window or the light. Those are separate trades on separate quotes, and a kitchen that feels dark with old cabinetry usually still feels dark with new.
And neither changes the plumbing stack or the position of the drains without a plumber. Moving a sink more than a short distance is a bigger job than either of these, and it belongs in the conversation before a cabinetry decision rather than after one.
How to tell which one you need
Three questions settle it more reliably than any amount of browsing.
Do you dislike how the kitchen looks, or how it works? If the layout is fine and it is the colour or the door style that has dated, nothing structural needs touching.
Are the boxes sound? Square, dry, firmly fixed, no swelling at the base. Photographs of the inside of a few cupboards answer this faster than a visit.
Does anything need to move? A fridge that will not fit, a run that wants reconfiguring, an island where there is currently floor.
Most Oakville kitchens answer: looks, sound, nothing moves. That kitchen wants refacing, and the households who arrive braced for a tear-out tend to leave relieved.
Side by side
The two jobs, on the things that actually differ
| Aspect | Refacing | Replacement |
|---|---|---|
| The boxes | Sprayed and kept. | Removed entirely. |
| Time without a kitchen | About five days. | Three to six weeks. |
| The layout | Cannot change. | Can change. |
| Cabinet sizes | The ones you already have. | Can be different. |
| Typical cost | $8,000 to $18,000. | $25,000, commonly $30,000 to $40,000. |
| Wall repair | None. | Usually needed. |
The refacing side of the comparison
This page sets the two options against each other; the service page behind it covers only the first in detail. If refacing is where you are landing, what the refacing week involves from first photograph to last door is worth reading next — the count that drives the price, the four weeks your doors are being made while the kitchen carries on working, and the five days when the crew is actually in the house.
The question that usually comes next
Cost and timeline are the first two questions, and durability is nearly always the third — a saving is only a saving if the result lasts. Knowing how long a refaced kitchen holds up before it looks tired again changes how the comparison above reads, because a job that needs redoing in five years is not cheaper than one that does not.
Questions
Common questions
- Is refacing cheaper than replacing kitchen cabinets?
- Substantially. Refacing typically runs $8,000 to $18,000 against $25,000 and commonly $30,000 to $40,000 for full replacement — a saving of roughly $17,000 to $22,000 like for like. Most of that is labour and disposal rather than materials.
- Does refacing look as good as new cabinets?
- It looks like new cabinetry, because the doors, the drawer fronts and the finish are new. What it will not do is look like a different kitchen — the layout and the cabinet sizes are the ones you already have.
- When is replacement genuinely the better choice?
- When the boxes have failed, or when the layout is the problem. Water damage, swollen bases and a room that fights you when you cook are none of them fixed by a new front, and refacing would be an expensive way to postpone the real job.
- How much longer does replacement take?
- Refacing puts the kitchen out of action for about five days. Replacement runs three to six weeks with the room as a construction zone throughout, and usually brings wall repair, and sometimes plumbing and electrical, with it.
Not sure which one your kitchen needs?
Send wide photographs of every run of cabinet, including inside a few. If the boxes are not worth keeping, the quote will say so.
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