Kitchens are one of the most popular rooms in the home and probably the number one room where remodeling can add tremendous value to your property. House flippers will focus a large portion of their budget on the kitchen as it is the biggest draw for house shoppers. What if your kitchen is in need of a face lift but you don’t have the major budget of a seasoned house flipper? You can benefit from a strong first impression by simply refacing your kitchen cabinets.
Essentially this requires a redo of the front faces of the cabinets and the hardware. This includes the doors, drawer fronts, cabinet handles and the cabinet body fronts.
One of the most common methods (and probably the cheapest) is to repaint all cabinet surfaces and doors. This doesn’t have to be a time consuming process, usually you can accomplish the entire job in 2 or 3 days. It does make a bit of a mess so it’s advised that you do all the door and drawer painting outside or in a well ventilated area of your home. For the cabinet body fronts you’ll paint them where they stand so put up plastic sheeting over the doorways to prevent excess paint and fumes from leaking into other rooms of your house.
The other most popular method is to simply replace all the doors, drawers and hardware while leaving the cabinet bodies in place and either painting or refinishing those. This method allows you the fun and freedom of shopping for new cabinet doors but also saving hundreds or thousands of dollars over the price of entirely new cabinets.
Cabinet refacing also allows you a lot of creative freedom. Crafty individuals will often cut out the middle section of cabinet doors and replace them with all sorts of materials including punched copper, shiny objects between panes of glass, or even dried food materials in colorful arrangements. Simply using glass insets will provide a more open space visually, but be sure you’re on the neat side as visitors will see the entire contents of your cabinets!
Before starting your cabinet refacing project check out various kitchen remodeling photos on the internet and in your local home improvement stores. They will have hundreds of great ideas to suit any budget. Most of all, have fun and enjoy the pick-me-up!