Cabinet refacing in Aurora, CO

Cabinet refacing suits a kitchen whose layout works and whose cabinets are sound but dated. It changes how the cabinets look and leaves the rest of the room alone. The boxes, the shelves inside them and the countertop stay where they are, and every cabinet surface you can see from the middle of the room is replaced. Most people looking at it in Aurora are weighing it against two other options at the same time, painting the doors they have or tearing the cabinets out, so this page covers all three.

What kitchen cabinet refacing includes

A refacing quote should list the parts of the job separately, because that is the only way to compare two quotes line against line.

The biggest line is the new doors and drawer fronts. Every existing one comes off and a new one, in the style and finish you picked, goes on in its place. Fixr lists three material grades for them: laminate (often sold as thermofoil), wood veneer and solid wood.

The second line is the face frame, the flat front edge of each cabinet box that the doors hang on. On a refacing job it gets covered with a thin veneer or laminate matching the new doors, and the exposed end panels at each end of a run get the same treatment. New hinges and pulls are normally in the package as well, since the new doors are drilled for their own hardware.

Anything beyond that is an add-on and belongs on its own line: new drawer boxes on full-extension runners, roll-out shelves in a base cabinet, crown molding along the tops of the uppers, or a finished panel on the back of an island.

A lighter version is sold as redooring. You get new doors and drawer fronts, and the frames are painted to match instead of veneered. It costs less and leaves more of the old cabinet on show, so it works best when the frames are smooth and undamaged.

Kitchen cabinet refacing cost

No published source breaks refacing prices out for Aurora. The two national cost guides below are the nearest thing to a benchmark, and they agree closely enough to be useful for reading a quote.

Two things move a refacing price more than anything else: how many feet of cabinets there are and what the new fronts are made of. Fixr's per-foot figures by material show the spread. Laminate runs $80 to $125 a linear foot, wood veneer $100 to $250, and solid wood $200 to $500. It puts labor at 50 to 70 percent of the total, because every opening has to be measured, every door and hinge removed and every surface prepared before the veneer goes on.

Kitchen size follows from the linear feet. Fixr counts a small kitchen, under 150 square feet, as having 16 to 25 linear feet of cabinets, and a medium one, 150 to 250 square feet, as 25 to 30. So if you count the doors and drawers and measure the runs before anyone visits, you can check a quote against these figures on the spot.

Kitchen cabinet painting or refacing

Painting keeps even more than refacing does. The doors stay and only their finish changes. Fixr describes the professional version as removing the doors and hardware, repairing any damage, sanding, then applying primer, paint and a finish before everything goes back up, and it puts the price for an average kitchen at $2,500 to $6,500. Spraying takes longer to prepare, it notes, but it is often cheaper than brushing.

The honest test is whether you like the doors you have. Paint changes the color and covers wear. It won't turn a raised-panel door into a flat shaker door, and it won't straighten one that has warped. Fixr also says laminate doors can't really be sanded, so painting them only works if they are undamaged. If the shape of the doors is what bothers you, painting leaves you with the same doors in a new color.

If the boxes themselves are the problem, new kitchen cabinets in Aurora, CO is the scope to read next. If the plan has grown past the cabinets to the counters, the floor and the layout, the page on kitchen remodeling in Aurora covers the whole-room version.

When cabinet refacing is the wrong answer

Refacing puts a new face on the boxes you have, so it is a good job exactly as far as those boxes are good. Fixr says as much: refacing only works on cabinets that are structurally sound with smooth, clean surfaces. That rules it out in a few common situations.

Start by opening the sink base. If its floor is swollen, soft or crumbling where water has got to it, a new door will hang on screws with nothing to hold them. Shelves that have sagged, joints that have opened up and a run of cabinets pulling away from the wall all point the same way. Fixr's painting guide makes the same call for laminate or MDF cabinets that have taken water damage: replace them.

Refacing also can't move anything. It won't relocate the sink, open a wall or add an island, and every box keeps its size and its place. If you want drawers where the doors are now, taller uppers or a wider gap for a bigger fridge, you want different cabinets, not different-looking ones.

Price is the last check. Fixr's range for refacing, $3,000 to $13,500, overlaps its range for replacing the cabinets, $4,000 to $15,000 or more. When a refacing quote lands near the cost of new stock boxes for the same run, new cabinets also reset the insides, and that is worth pricing before you sign.

A careful refacing proposal says which of these someone checked. Ask whether anybody looked inside the sink base, and what they saw.

Who can reface cabinets in Aurora

The City of Aurora licenses contractors itself. Its Building Division says: "To work in the city of Aurora as a contractor, you will need to obtain the appropriate license to build, construct, alter, repair, add to, demolish or move any building or structure." One of the license types the City issues is a Remodeling Contractor license, and the published requirements for it are registration with the Building Division and three years of documented experience.

Electrical and plumbing work sit outside that license. The City does not issue its own electrical or plumbing contractor licenses. Electricians and plumbers need a master's and contractor's license from the State of Colorado, on file with the Building Division. That only matters on a refacing job if the job grows: lighting wired inside the wall under the uppers is electrical work, and moving the sink is plumbing.

You can check a business yourself on the City's Online Contractor Lookup Tool, by name or by license type. The same tool notes that the City cannot endorse any of the contractors it lists, so a result tells you a license exists and nothing more. Homeowners can also pull permits for work on their own primary home, and the kitchen remodel permits guide covers which kitchen jobs need one.