The Short Answer on Vanity Cabinet Refacing
Bathroom vanity refacing costs $600 to $1,500 for a single vanity and $1,200 to $2,600 for a double, and it is usually a one-day job. New doors and drawer fronts go on the existing vanity cabinet, the exposed cabinet sides and face frame are veneered to match, and the countertop, basin, taps and plumbing are never touched. It is the cheapest genuine cabinet job in the house and the one most Columbus homeowners try first.
Why a Vanity Cabinet Is Easier Than a Kitchen
A kitchen has twenty-five to forty doors and drawer fronts, six or eight cabinet runs, exposed end panels and moulding. A vanity has two or three doors, maybe a bank of drawers, and one or two exposed sides. The material cost drops accordingly, and so does the labour: the doors are made off site the same way, and the day on site is one visit rather than a week of them.
It is also a low-risk way to see the work. If you are weighing a $6,000 kitchen cabinet refacing job and cannot picture how a painted Shaker door will look in your house, spend $900 on the guest bathroom first and stand in front of the result for a fortnight.
Matching a Vanity Cabinet to the Rest of the House
Most Columbus bathrooms have one cabinet in them, which makes the colour decision easier than a kitchen's and the lighting harder. A vanity cabinet is usually lit by one fitting directly above a mirror, and that light flatters some finishes and ruins others. If you are matching a vanity to cabinets you already have elsewhere in the house, take an actual spare cabinet door into the bathroom rather than a photograph of one.
The other choice worth making deliberately is whether the vanity should match the kitchen at all. Plenty of houses look better with a darker or bolder vanity cabinet than the kitchen cabinets would ever carry, and a single small cabinet is a low-risk place to try a colour you like.
The One Thing That Kills a Vanity Cabinet Reface
Water, and vanities get more of it than kitchen cabinets do. There is plumbing directly under the basin, and there is shower steam sitting in the room every day. A vanity cabinet in a Columbus bathroom is working in a humid room inside a humid climate, and the base panel is where it shows first.
The test takes ten seconds. Open the doors under the basin and press the floor of the cabinet firmly with your thumb. If it gives, flakes or carries a dark tide line, the box has already failed and refacing it is throwing good money after bad. That vanity wants replacing, and a straight swap-out for a stock unit is often barely more than the reface would have been.
What Gets Done to the Vanity Cabinet, and What Does Not
- Changed: the doors, the drawer fronts, the hinges, the pulls, and the veneer on the face frame and any exposed cabinet side.
- Optional: new drawer boxes or roll-out trays inside, a matching toe kick, and a fitted end panel where the vanity stands proud into the room.
- Untouched: the countertop, the basin, the taps, the waste, the supply lines, the mirror and the tiling. Nothing is disconnected and the bathroom stays in use.
Rentals, Turnover and Fort Benning
40,025 of Columbus's 81,415 occupied homes are rented — 49.2%, one of the higher shares in Georgia, and Fort Benning is much of the reason. A rental bathroom that turns over every two or three years is a natural vanity refacing candidate: a dated cabinet becomes a current one for a few hundred dollars, inside the window between tenants, without a plumber ever being booked. Landlords with several units usually do them in a batch, which is cheaper again.
Cabinet refacing is dispatched across the consolidated Columbus–Muscogee County area and out into the Chattahoochee Valley: Columbus, Fort Benning, Fortson, Midland, Upatoi, Cataula, Ellerslie, Hamilton, Waverly Hall and Pine Mountain in Georgia, plus Phenix City and Smiths Station across the river in Alabama. Columbus and Muscogee County are the same government — Georgia's first consolidated city-county, merged in 1971 — so “city” here means the whole county: 203,711 people and 92,031 housing units, inside a metro area of 325,615. The cabinet work does not change when you cross the state line at the Chattahoochee; the drive time does, so say where you are when you call.