Karen and Tom have a great townhome in Willowbrook. It was beautifully decorated with a lot of Craftsman style furnishings and fixtures. The kitchen, however, needed help. When the home was built it had basic, dark oak cabinets. The original owner did what many people do – painted the cabinets white. As usual, this wasn’t a great long-term solution.
The painted oak cabinet still shows the grain
Besides the oak grain showing through the painted finish, the high use areas were chipping and showing a lot of wear.
Painted cabinets showing wear around the handles
The first company they called out wanted to tear everything out – open up the walls and start from scratch. Besides the fact that it would mean living in chaos for several weeks, the price tag was similar to what you would pay for a luxury car. They decided to explore other options.
New Granite and Cabinet Refacing
I came out on a Thursday afternoon and took a look at the cabinets. Besides the failing paint job, they were in good shape. I showed them a few door styles from jobs I had recently completed and they chose a simple, recessed panel cherry door in Cinnamon stain. They both agreed that from a cost-benefit perspective, refacing was a much better choice than the full tearout. I gave them a door sample to take granite shopping.
I recommended a granite fabricator and they picked out a slab of Tan Brown granite. As a side note – I recommend getting your granite installed first, before refacing. The reason is that granite (or quartz) often has to be shimmed quite a bit to make it level. Sometimes the gap between the cabinet base and the granite can be 1/2″ or more because of the shimming. If I do the refacing after the granite install, I can cover that gap with my solid-wood refacing material.
When I cam back to do the final measurements, Karen had been on the Walzcraft website (my material supplier), and found a slightly different cabinet door that she really liked. It was still a recessed panel solid cherry door, but it had square-peg walnut wood inlays in the corners. It was a slightly more expensive door, but still within their budget.
I covered the eixsting cabinet boxes with solid cherry, installed these great mission/craftsman cherry doors on soft-close Blum hinges and was completely finished in 4 1/2 days.
I love my job.