How do I tell whether my cabinet boxes are worth keeping?

Open every door and pull every drawer, then check four things. Press the bottom panel of the sink base with your thumb, because that is where water goes. Look at whether the boxes are still square in their openings. Tug a door and see whether the hinge screws are still biting solid wood. And check whether the shelves sag. Boxes that pass all four are worth refacing; boxes that fail the sink-base test usually are not.

Should I reface or just refinish?

Refinish if you like the shape of your doors and only want a different colour, and if the doors are solid wood or veneer in sound condition. Reface if the doors are the problem: dated raised-panel profiles, thermofoil that is peeling at a corner, or a style you cannot live with regardless of colour. Refinishing cannot change a door's shape and no finish hides a delaminating skin.

When is replacing the cabinets genuinely the right answer?

Three situations. If the layout is wrong and you want it changed, refacing cannot help you. If the boxes are water damaged, out of square or built from crumbling particleboard, you are veneering a problem. And if you want features the existing boxes cannot deliver, such as deep pan drawers where fixed shelves are now, the carcass has to change.

Does refacing add value when I sell?

The honest answer is that a refaced kitchen shows like an updated kitchen in photographs and in a walkthrough, which is where most of the effect on a sale actually happens. Nobody can promise a specific return, and any cabinet company that quotes you a percentage is guessing. What is defensible is that a $6,000 reface and a $22,000 replacement often look very similar in a listing photo.

Can I reface only the upper cabinets, or only part of the kitchen?

You can, but be careful about it. Refacing part of a run and leaving the rest almost never looks deliberate, because the new finish next to the old one draws the eye straight to the join. Where it does work is a genuinely separate area: a laundry cupboard, a bathroom vanity, or a butler's pantry in another room.

Cabinet Refacing vs Replacing in Columbus, GA

The Short Answer on Refacing, Refinishing and Replacing

If the cabinet boxes are sound and the layout works, reface. If the layout is wrong or the boxes are wet, replace. If you only want a different colour and the doors are good, refinish. That is the whole decision, and the reason it feels harder than it is is that cabinet companies sell one of the three and describe the other two accordingly.

The Four-Point Box Test

You can run this yourself in about ten minutes, and it is the same test any honest cabinet refacing estimator runs when they arrive. Every point is about the cabinet boxes, because the boxes are the only thing refacing keeps.

1. Press the sink base bottom. Open the cabinet under the kitchen sink and push the floor of it firmly with your thumb. If it gives, flakes, or has a dark tide line, water has been working on it. This is the single most common reason a Columbus kitchen fails a reface assessment.
2. Check the cabinet run for square. Look along it with the doors closed. Do the gaps between the cabinet doors stay parallel, or do they open into a wedge? Boxes that have racked out of square will not accept new cabinet doors without shimming, and past a certain point they will not accept them at all.
3. Tug a door. Pull a door firmly at the hinge side. If the hinge screws pull out of soft, crumbling material rather than holding into solid wood or dense board, new hinges have nothing to grip and the reface will not hold.
4. Load a shelf. Look at the cabinet shelves under weight. A permanent sag says the box material has failed even where the cabinet front still looks fine.

What Each of the Three Cabinet Products Actually Changes

The words get used loosely, so here they are pinned down. Cabinet refinishing keeps your existing cabinet doors and changes only their colour. Cabinet refacing replaces the doors and drawer fronts and skins the visible faces of the cabinet boxes in matching veneer, so the cabinets read as new while the carcasses stay put. Cabinet replacement takes the boxes out entirely and is the only one of the three that can move a cabinet, add a drawer bank or change the layout.

Cabinet resurfacing is not a fourth product. It is a synonym almost everyone uses for refacing, and if a quote uses that word it is worth confirming which of the three it means before comparing prices.

Refacing, Refinishing and Replacing Side by Side

The same average Columbus, Georgia kitchen, three ways. Local estimates, not quotations.
	Refinishing	Cabinet refacing	Replacement
Typical cost	$2,000 – $4,500	$4,000 – $10,000	$12,000 – $30,000+
Time on site	3 – 6 days	3 – 5 days	2 – 6 weeks
Kitchen usable	Mostly	Yes, throughout	No
Door style changes	No	Yes	Yes
Layout changes	No	No	Yes
Countertop stays	Yes	Yes	Rarely
Needs sound boxes	Yes	Yes	No

Why Refacing Wins in Columbus More Often Than It Loses

The housing stock is the reason. 47,970 Columbus homes — 52.1% of everything standing — were built between 1960 and 1999, and cabinet boxes from that window are usually plywood and solid lumber with face frames, built on site or delivered as real casework. They are frequently better made than the mid-range replacement cabinetry that would go in their place, which means a homeowner who replaces them can spend $20,000 and end up with a thinner carcass than the one they threw away.

The exception is the late-1990s builder kitchen, and Columbus has 10,068 units built in the 1990s. Those often used thin particleboard boxes with a printed melamine interior. Some of them reface perfectly well; some of them fail point three of the box test the first time you tug a door. That is a look-at-it question, not a guess-from-the-year question.

When You Should Be Told No

A cabinet refacing quote is worth roughly what the estimator's willingness to walk away is worth. Here is what an honest one says no to.

A wet sink base or dishwasher run. Fix the leak, rebuild or replace the affected boxes, then talk about cabinet refacing.
A layout you already dislike. Refacing will make a kitchen you resent look more expensive. It will not make it work.
Boxes that have racked. Beyond a small amount of shimming, out-of-square cabinet boxes cannot be brought back with new doors.
A kitchen where the floor or ceiling is coming out anyway. If the room is being gutted around the cabinets, the sequencing usually favours replacing the cabinets rather than refacing them.

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.