Response from Reface Cabinets
Greatly appreciate this review. Taking a few minutes to try and help people by giving them good advice is the right thing to do. And it is good business. If someone isn’t a real candidate for our Refacing service, better to figure it out up front, without wasting each other’s time. We offer a great value on high quality Refacing work, but there are many cases where Refinishing can be a good and economical choice. It’s common for folks to need more information to help decide between Refacing and Refinishing. We pretty much walked away from Refinishing 2 1/2 years ago to focus on Refacing. But having done dozens of Refinishing jobs prior to that, we can offer valuable insights and advice. The reality is that if Refinishing is the right solution for you, it is unlikely you will buy a Refacing job at 2 1/2 times the price of Refinishing. There are several considerations; First off, the finish which will give the best service in the kitchen is Lacquer, so to do a good Refinishing job, you have to be willing to have a crew come in and spray finish your cabinet boxes in your kitchen. This will take 3 to 4 days to accomplish including a day set up and mask everything off. And you ought to plan to go out of town while they are doing the work, because it will really stink. But Refinishing is a good option if you like the doors you have now and you like the style hinges you have, and you want to go from stained wood to a darker stained wood with a Dye Stain. Or you if already have some solid color cabinets such as white, and you want to another solid color such as an antique white glaze. You typically can't go from a solid color to a stain. First off, the material under the solid color cabinets usually is not stain-able. Cabinet makers don't buy expensive stain grade wood only to cover it up with an opaque color. Typically white cabinets have doors which are milled out of Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) which cannot be stained to look like wood because it is not real wood. Even if the doors on solid color cabinets are real wood, they are likely Paint Grade which means they still wouldn't look good with stain, even if it were feasible to strip them to bare wood. Oak cabinets are very poor candidates for refinishing. In general, people these days find the grain of Oak cabinets to be very unattractive. If you refinish them in a solid color the grain will show right through the paint (Lacquer or any other type). If a refinisher tells you otherwise, give him one of your doors, or make him buy a sample Oak door and finish half of it to show you he really can hide the grain. Another area which is a problem for Dye Stain refinishing is if you have old visible “butterfly” hinges and want modern hidden hinges. There are the screw holes and impressions left by the old hinges to contend with. If you are going to a solid color, butterfly hinges aren’t so much of an issue, as the screw holes can be filled. So can any hinge imprints in the cabinet face frames. Finally, if your existing finish is starting to come off, such as splitting Rigid ThermoFoil (RTF) you are not a candidate for Refinishing. You could have the doors or drawers that are splitting replaced and then refinish, but what if more of them start splitting after you spend a good bit of money on a Refinishing job? The point is that if you have a good substrate you are a much better candidate for Refinishing.