The Short Answer on Cabinet Hardware
Cabinet hardware is the cheapest visible improvement you can make to a cabinet, and the one people notice most. Soft-close hinges across a Columbus kitchen run $450 to $1,200 fitted. New pulls and knobs are a few hundred. Full-extension glides and new drawer boxes are priced per drawer. None of it changes what your kitchen looks like from the doorway, and all of it changes what it feels like to use.
Cabinet Hinges: the Upgrade Worth Doing First
Cabinet hinges come in three broad families and which one you have decides what is possible. Concealed European hinges sit inside the cabinet and are invisible when the door is shut; most of these accept a clip-on soft-close damper for a few dollars each, which is the cheapest worthwhile upgrade in this entire trade. Semi-concealed wrap-around hinges, common in Columbus kitchens built in the 1970s and 1980s, show a small knuckle at the door edge and have to be replaced outright to get soft-close. Surface-mounted hinges are fully visible and need the face frames filled and re-bored when they go.
Cabinet Drawers: Boxes, Fronts and Glides Are Three Separate Things
People say “new drawers” and mean any of three components, which is how quotes end up incomparable. The drawer front is the face you see and it changes with a cabinet reface. The drawer box is the tray behind it. The glides are the runners it slides on. You can change any one of the three without the others.
- Keep the box, change the front. Right answer when the box is a dovetailed wood tray in good order. Pull one right out and look at the corner joint: interlocking fingers means keep it.
- Change the glides only. Old nylon centre-mount rollers let a drawer sag and stop about four inches short of fully open. Swapping to full-extension ball-bearing or undermount glides gives you the back of the drawer back.
- Change the whole box. Right answer for stapled particleboard trays with a blown corner or a bowed bottom. New boxes are built to the opening and run on new glides.
What a Hardware-Only Cabinet Job Costs
Everything on this page can be bought without touching the cabinet doors. Soft-close hinges across a twenty-five to thirty-five door Columbus kitchen run $450 to $1,200 fitted. New pulls and knobs on the same cabinets are a few hundred dollars plus the filling and finishing of any old holes. Full-extension glides are priced per drawer, and a new drawer box is priced per drawer on top of that.
For a kitchen whose cabinet doors are still in good condition and simply feel tired to use, a hardware-only job is frequently the best value on this entire site. It will not change what the kitchen looks like from the doorway. It changes every single interaction you have with the cabinets.
Roll-Out Trays, and the One Cabinet They Do Not Fit
A roll-out tray is a shelf on glides inside a base cabinet, so the pans at the back come to you instead of you going in after them on your knees. They fit almost any base cabinet and they are consistently the upgrade people say they should have done years ago. The exception is a cabinet with a fixed centre stile splitting the opening in two, which is common in older face-framed Columbus cabinetry: the tray can only be as wide as the narrower opening, and sometimes that makes it not worth doing.
Cabinet Pulls, Knobs and the Holes Underneath Them
Changing handles looks like the simplest job on this page and has one complication: hole spacing. Existing pulls are drilled at a set centre distance, and a new pull with different centres needs new holes, which means the old ones have to be filled and finished. On a cabinet door that is being replaced anyway it does not matter at all. On doors you are keeping, either match the existing spacing or accept that filling and touching in is part of the job.
Do It During the Cabinet Reface
Every item on this page is dramatically cheaper fitted while a cabinet refacing or door replacement job is already under way, because the doors are already off, the face frames are already exposed and the tools are already in the house. Booked as a separate visit later, you pay for the trip, the setup and the disassembly a second time. If you are getting new cabinet doors, decide the hardware at the same time.
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.