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Refacing
Kitchen Cabinets
JAY
ROMANO
07/25/99
When Shirley Lind decided it was
time to do something about the 30-year-old kitchen cabinets in her house
in White Plains, her first inclination was to rip out the old ones and install
new ones in their place
. But then she realized that while the outsides of the cabinets
were scratched and scuffed, the insides were nearly as good as new. And that
set Mrs. Lind to thinking about refacing her cabinets instead of replacing
them.
"I was a bit skeptical at first," she said, explaining that
the initial image she had of refaced cabinets was a cheesy plastic laminate
material printed to resemble wood. "But I want to tell you that what I ended
up with was way beyond my expectations. I now have an absolutely
drop-dead-beautiful kitchen and I saved thousands of dollars getting it."
Cabinet makers say that because older cabinets were often built
with greater care and better materials than the mass-produced cabinets available
today, it would be difficult and expensive to replace old cabinets with new
models of equal quality. And since even inexpensive cabinets can cost thousands
of dollars to buy and install, it often makes sense for homeowners to keep
well-built, functional cabinets in place and update them with a facelift
instead of a transplant.
"In most cases, a kitchen
cabinet built 30 years ago is going to be as good as or better than the
highest-end cabinets being sold today," said David Hare, the owner of Custom
Kitchen Cabinet Refacing, a cabinet maker and refacing company based in North
Tonawanda, N.Y. "In my opinion, it would be foolish to take down old,
custom-built cabinetry just to replace it with a bunch of particle-board
boxes with fake wood-grain fronts."
In addition to squandering good craftsmanship, he said, removing
old cabinets and replacing them with new ones also results in wasting money
as well.
"There are a bunch of hidden costs involved when you replace existing cabinets,"
he said, among them delivery charges and sales taxes on the new cabinets
and the labor and carting costs associated with removing and discarding the
old cabinets. And in addition to the cost of the new cabinets themselves
— which can easily exceed $10,000 for a modest-sized
kitchen — installation can cost hundreds and
even thousands of dollars more. Typically, he said, installers charge an
average of $75 for each linear foot of cabinetry being installed.
And finally, he said, there is also the cost of patching or
retiling areas where the new cabinets fail to line up with existing tile
lines on walls and floors.
Paul Bookbinder, president of Kitchen
Tune-Ups, the cabinet-refacing company in Rye Brook, N.Y., retained by Ms.
Lind, said that the term refacing is really a misnomer.
"We actually replace the doors and fronts of the drawers with
the material you've chosen," Mr. Bookbinder said. Of three types of material
generally used in cabinet refacing, he said, the best and most expensive
is real wood.
"We offer oak, maple, cherry, hickory and birch and all of
them come in a variety of colors," Mr. Bookbinder said. "When we do a real
wood job we put on solid wood doors and drawer-fronts and wood veneers on
the sides and front." Even the term "veneer" can be slightly misleading,
he said, for the wood veneer his company uses to reface the front surface
of existing cabinets is actually a sheet of solid wood 1/16th of an inch
thick. The veneer used on the sides of cabinets, he said, is 3/16ths of an
inch thick.
A wood-refacing job, he said, will typically cost about 50
percent of what it would cost to remove existing cabinets and replace them
with new high-quality cabinets.
It is also possible to have cabinets refaced with a material
called Rigid Thermo Foil, also known as RTF.
"It's kid-proof," Mr. Bookbinder said, explaining that Thermo
Foil is polyvinyl-chloride coating about 1/16th of an inch thick that is
bonded to wood or particle-board core. "Thermo Foil comes in solid colors
and in wood-grain," he said. The third way to reface cabinets is with laminates
that are either solid colors or printed to simulate wood grain.
"We're moving away from the laminates because they don't really
have the resilience of Thermo Foil," Mr. Bookbinder said. "But laminates
are the least expensive way to reface your cabinets."
Generally speaking, Mr. Bookbinder said, a refacing job in
a average-sized kitchen would run anywhere from $3,500 to $7,000, depending
on the material used.
Alan Watts, the owner of Darlan Custom Cabinets in Hornell,
N.Y., said that unless one's budget is severely constrained, it is usually
best to use real wood for refacing.
"We don't use any of those 'lick-and-stick' pictures of wood
that you glue on the cabinets like wallpaper," Mr. Watts said, adding that
even real wood laminates can chip, split and splinter and become unglued
if the laminate is too thin. "We use only solid wood that is a quarter- to
a half-inch thick."
For
homeowners who have some time on their hands and a modicum of talent for
working with wood, most refacing companies also sell kits for do-it-yourselfers.
"Once you have all the pieces assembled and cut, an average
homeowner with some woodworking knowledge can do an average kitchen over
a weekend," said Mr. Hare, the owner of Custom Kitchen Cabinet Refacing,
who sells refacing materials over his Internet Web site at
www.reface.com.
Mr. Hare explained that in most cases, homeowners who reface
their cabinets themselves must first decide what kind of material and look
they want — wood, Thermo Foil or laminate.
Once the desired material is chosen, Mr. Hare said, do-it-yourself
customers are then asked to take detailed, accurate measurements of door
openings and cabinet widths and heights. "We'll make the doors to fit in
the frames, and ship the doors and the veneer off to the customer," he said,
adding that the veneer can be cut to fit with a razor blade. After the existing
cabinet surface has been either sanded or coated with a layer of shellac,
he explained, all the homeowner has to do is peel off the backing from the
veneer to expose the self-adhesive backing.
"This is not like building a Formula One race car," he said,
noting that with the doors already cut to the proper size and fitted with
hinges and handles, all that remains to do is to apply the veneer to the
exposed surfaces of the cabinets and then attach the doors with a drill and
a screwdriver.
"Somebody with a modest amount of woodworking knowledge can
start the job on a Saturday morning and have a room full of beautiful kitchen
cabinets by Sunday night." |
