Cabinets are the biggest visual surface in a kitchen and usually the biggest line on the quote. Before you price anything, there is one question to settle: are you changing the finish, the doors, or the whole thing?
Refacing usually lands somewhere around a third to a half of what replacing the same kitchen costs, and painting is well under that again. The trade is that neither one moves a wall or gains you an inch of storage.
Paint and refacing both bet on the boxes. Five minutes with a flashlight tells you whether that bet is safe.
Plywood boxes in sound condition are excellent refacing candidates. Particleboard that is dry, square and solid takes paint perfectly well — it is water damage, not the material itself, that rules it out.
This is the part that surprises homeowners, and it can decide the whole project.
Several Bay Area cities treat replacing cabinets and refacing them as different categories of work. Mountain View states it plainly: no permit is required to replace countertops or reface existing cabinets, but a kitchen remodel that includes replacing the cabinets does need one — with stamped plans and electrical load calculations. Sunnyvale draws the same line. San José goes the other way and counts cabinet replacement as cosmetic work needing no permit at all.
So in some cities refacing keeps you permit-exempt on work that would otherwise need a permit, plans and an inspection. That is worth knowing before you choose.
Where a permit does apply, it is not necessarily slow. Mountain View quotes about five business days for a like-for-like replacement — but two to three months once you start removing walls. The permit follows the scope, not the cabinets.
One call to your building department settles it. Our guide to pre-sale work that needs no permit covers where the rest of a kitchen refresh sits.
If a photo date or a listing is driving your schedule, that difference matters more than the price does.
The right answer changes completely depending on which one you are.
The finish matters as much as the choice. Painted cabinets and trim want semi-gloss for the scrubbing they will take — our interior paint sheen guide explains which finish belongs where.
When the boxes are sound and the layout works, yes — it is one of the better value moves in a kitchen. Refacing replaces every surface you can see, so the result reads as a new kitchen, and it typically costs somewhere around a third to a half of replacing the same run. It stops being worth it in two situations: when the boxes are failing, because you are putting new doors on a structure that is going to be pulled out anyway, and when the layout is the actual problem, because refacing cannot move anything.
Refinishing changes the color of what you already have — the existing doors and boxes are cleaned, sanded, primed and repainted or restained. Refacing replaces the visible parts: new doors and drawer fronts, new veneer over the face frames and exposed cabinet ends, and new hinges and hardware, all mounted on the boxes you already own. Refinishing keeps your door style; refacing lets you change it. Refinishing is the cheaper of the two by a clear margin.
Look at the raw bottom edge of a wall cabinet, where the material is usually left unfinished. Plywood shows thin layers of wood glued crosswise, like a striped edge. Particleboard shows a uniform field of pressed chips. It matters because plywood boxes commonly last 25 to 50 years and take refacing well, while particleboard averages 10 to 15 and is the material that swells and crumbles when water reaches it. Dry, solid particleboard still paints perfectly well — it is water damage that rules a box out, not the material by itself.
It depends on your city, and neighboring Bay Area cities genuinely disagree. Mountain View requires a building permit for a kitchen remodel that includes replacing the cabinets, and states that replacing countertops or refacing existing cabinets needs no permit. Sunnyvale draws the same line. San José treats cabinet replacement with no structural change as cosmetic work needing no permit at all. Because refacing is exempt in the cities that regulate replacement, the choice between the two can decide whether you pull a permit. One call to your building department settles it before you commit.
About three to ten days of work in your kitchen, and two to four weeks from order to finish once the new doors and drawer fronts are made. That is the main practical argument for it over replacement: semi-custom cabinets frequently run past ten weeks in lead time before installation even starts, followed by another two to six weeks of work. If a listing photo date or a family schedule is driving the project, refacing buys you most of the look in a fraction of the time.
Usually not. A full cabinet replacement rarely returns what it costs at sale, and you are choosing finishes for a buyer who has not been consulted. Paint or refacing does the work that actually shows in listing photos, at a fraction of the money and in days rather than months. The exception is cabinets that are visibly failing — water-damaged boxes, doors that no longer close — because a buyer's inspector will find them and negotiate against them anyway.
Laminate can be painted with the right preparation: a thorough degrease, a scuff sand, and a bonding primer made for slick surfaces. Skip any of those and the paint peels in sheets. Thermofoil is harder, because the vinyl skin is heat-bonded to an MDF core and tends to lift at the edges near the oven and dishwasher — once it has started peeling, paint will not hold it down. Doors in that condition are the argument for refacing, since new fronts on sound boxes solve it properly.
