Refacing Kitchen Cabinets

Refacing kitchen cabinets is worth due to the return on investment that you get out of it. But what is kitchen cabinet refacing anyway?

It is one way to give your kitchen a new look and feel, a new style, basically it is remodeling it when you can’t afford to buy a whole new kitchen furniture altogether.

When you are refacing your kitchen cabinets you will replace or veneer the parts of the existing cabinet that are visible to all. Also you replace completely drawer fronts and all the cabinet doors. Having your kitchen refaced can give an entire new look to your kitchen while saving lots of money in the process when you can’t afford something new entirely. Who said that only women can get a face lift? Kitchen can get one too!

When you are refacing your cabinets for your kitchen, you can coordinate a new wall paint or a new flooring design ending up with a really stylish kitchen. If you are a DIY type of person, this project is just right for you. It will take a while to get it done, but imagine the final result and imagine the adoring and thankful look on your wife’s face when she will finally see her new kitchen. That is worth it all in the first place!

While you are doing your cabinets refacing, you can also do other jobs in the kitchen such as add a “lazy susan” in one of the corner cabinets, add self-closing hinges that are very useful when your wife is in the habit of opening and closing the cabinet doors all the time, or even add roll-out shelves for those heavy pots, making better use of your existing space in your cabinets.

You can actually complete a refacing job in a few days only and the cost is really small, a fraction of the cost of actually remodeling your entire kitchen.

Of course refacing kitchen cabinets does not come without its drawbacks as well. You really need to have the patience and be a do-it-yourself type of person to start such a task. You also need to have all the necessary tools and materials needed as you have to do many different things requiring many different set of tools. If you are in the middle of the cabinet refacing job and you’re missing a particular screwdriver, you won’t be able to proceed until you go out there and buy a new one. Waste of time.

Also you need to plan in advance and plan well which might take you a couple of weeks before you start the facing work. Ordering the materials in advance is a must. So basically only undertake a kitchen cabinet refacing job if you are sure you can actually do it from start to finish and you enjoy the work as well. Otherwise you either leave it to the professionals or get yourself a new kitchen style involving stainless steel cabinets, for example, which don’t really need refacing at all and they look ‘tres chic’ and very modern. Many people go for stainless steel or metal cabinets for their kitchen as this seems to be the latest rage with younger couples. And with right, as they truly look sleek and give your kitchen a futuristic and modern look.

Most people simply install kitchen cabinets once and they forget about them due ot the fact that there are so many other important things that need maintenance that kitchen cabinets usually get neglected. It is quite true however, that an ordinary man simply cannot afford to replace kitchen cabinets every now and then, and therefore aims to select durable, hard wearing ones that would last long without deteriorating. But the fact remains with everything on this planet, that with time, everything degrades and needs repair and proper maintenance.

Cabinets are exposed to all sorts of factors in the kitchen, for people who do not have a division for the pantry and the cooking area, these cabinets are exposed to moisture in the form of steam, water, grease, sometimes infestation by pests, and various other factors that can lead to deterioration of the cabinets. Therefore it is important to pay proper attention and time to the maintenance of your kitchen cabinets, just like everything else in the house. Simply because cabinets are not something you can replace over and over again.

The parts of these kitchen cabinets that gets affected the most by these degrading factors are the cabinet faces and surfaces. The cabinets generally stay in good condition on the inside, but the external surface can easily get damaged and display poor aesthetics in the kitchen no matter how clean you try to keep it. One look at your deteriorating cabinet surfaces can tell someone a great deal about your household maintenance skills and interests. Here are a few tips on how to re-face your kitchen cabinets at home with ease:

• Buying the correct material: It is important to buy the correct material when you are installing cabinets in your kitchen for the first time. For example it is a fact that wood is a poor choice when it comes to moisture and heat resistance, and the stains it absorbs can be quite a hassle to get rid of. Go for laminated ply wood, which is the ideal choice, it looks like wood but has countless benefits.
• Lamination: If you already have wooden cabinets, simply get lamination sheets in the color and texture that would go with your kitchen and fix these onto the external surface of the wood to protect it for moisture.
• Maintaining laminated surfaces: Laminated surfaces are so much easier to manage; you can simply wipe them clean with the help of a dry cloth and a water spray.
• Oil emulsion paints: Peel off any regular paint that you might have on the cabinets and coat them with oil emulsion paints or something similar e.g. varnish for the surface.
• Replace pre-existing lamination sheets: Replace your pre-existing sheets to give a new look to the cabinets, for a change; switch the color to something different.