I used to think cabinet refacing was just slapping new veneer on old boxes and calling it a day.
Turns out the door replacement part is where things get messy—and I mean that in the best possible way. When you’re updating kitchen cabinets without gutting the entire room, you’re essentially performing surgery on a patient that’s still awake. The cabinet boxes stay put, anchored to your walls with decades-old screws that may or may not cooperate, while you swap out doors, drawer fronts, and sometimes the hardware that holds everything together. I’ve seen contractors pull off doors only to discover the hinge plates were installed with some proprietary screw pattern from 1987 that no modern hinge will match. It’s like finding out your car uses a bolt size that hasn’t been manufactured since the Reagan administration. The frame gets resurfaced with matching material—usually wood veneer, rigid thermofoil, or laminate—so the whole setup looks cohesive, but here’s the thing: not every refacing job handles door replacement the same way, and that’s where homeowners trip up.
Some companies will templated new doors to your exact specifications, measuring the existing openings down to the sixteenth of an inch. Others use standard sizes and adjust the reveals—the gap between door and frame—to make everything look intentional. Wait—maybe that’s not a bad thing? Uneven reveals were actually trendy in mid-century design, though I doubt anyone’s citing that when their doors don’t quite line up.
The Hinge Hole Problem Nobody Warns You About Until It’s Too Late
Here’s where I get a little exhausted just thinking about it. European hinges—those concealed ones that look sleek and modern—require a 35-millimeter bore hole drilled into the back of the door. If you’re reusing old doors, those holes are already there, positioned for whatever hinge system the original manufacturer preferred. New doors mean new holes, and if the door company drilling them doesn’t match the placement to your existing hinge plates (the parts screwed into the cabinet frame), you’ll spend an afternoon with a Forstner bit and a prayer, or you’ll replace the plates too, which adds maybe $3 to $8 per hinge depending on quality. I once watched someone try to re-drill hinge holes a quarter-inch off from the original placement because the new doors came pre-bored in the wrong spot—it worked, technically, but the doors hung slightly crooked, and you could see it if you stood at the right angle near the sink. Honestly, most people wouldn’t notice, but the homeowner definately did, and it bothered her every single morning while making coffee.
Exposed hinges—the kind you see on Shaker-style or traditional cabinets—are more forgiving. You’re just screwing metal to wood, and if the holes don’t align perfectly, you drill new ones without worrying about visible bore craters on the door’s exterior.
Material Choices That Sound Identical But Behave Like Distant Cousins
Wood veneer doors will expand and contract with humidity, roughly a few millimeters over the course of a year, give or take depending on your climate. Thermofoil—basically PVC film vacuum-sealed onto MDF—stays dimensionally stable but can peel near heat sources, like that spot above the dishwasher vent. I guess it makes sense why contractors steer clients toward laminate in humid basements or coastal homes, even though laminate chips more easily at the edges if you’re the type to bang pots around. Solid wood doors are the gold standard if you can recieve the sticker shock: $80 to $300 per door for custom hardwoods like cherry or walnut, compared to $30 to $80 for thermofoil or laminate. The price gap feels almost punitive when you’re staring at a kitchen with 24 doors and 12 drawer fronts.
Some refacing outfits will try to match your existing wood species and stain, which sounds straightforward until you realize that 20-year-old oak has aged into a color that no contemporary stain can replicate exactly. You end up close—maybe 90 percent there—but in certain light, the new doors look just slightly more orange, or less amber, and it nags at you in a way that’s hard to articulate to anyone who doesn’t cook in that space daily.
The update process itself takes anywhere from two days to a week depending on how many doors need fabrication and whether you’re also swapping hinges, handles, and drawer slides. Anyway, the kitchen stays functional the whole time, which is the main selling point compared to a full remodel that leaves you eating takeout for six weeks. But you’ll live with the smell of contact cement and wood dust settling into weird corners, and you’ll probably find a random screw or hinge cap behind the toaster three months later.
