Refacing · Davie, FL

Where Cabinet Refacing Falls Short in Davie

Where cabinet refacing falls short in Davie is everything behind the door. A reface replaces what you see and touch: doors, drawer fronts, hinges, pulls, and the face frames around them. It does not change the inside of a single box, it does not move anything, and it does not reset the age of the cabinet it is bolted to. Those three limits apply to every refacing job, including a good one.

What a reface replaces: What you see; Doors, fronts, frames, hardware
What it leaves: What you open; Shelves, slides, box interiors

Where cabinet refacing falls short in Davie: a finished kitchen with white shaker doors, a light quartz countertop, a stainless range and a window above the sink

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What the New Doors Do Not Reach

Open a base cabinet in a kitchen built in the eighties and the problem is usually not the door. It is the single fixed shelf with a cavern under it, the wall cabinet that is only eleven inches deep, the drawer that rides on wooden runners and sticks in August, the corner unit you have to lie down to reach. New fronts leave all of it. You get a kitchen that looks new and opens exactly the way it opened before.

Some of that is retrofittable and some is not. Roll-out trays, soft-close slides and new drawer boxes can go into a sound carcass, and they are worth pricing at the same time as the doors, because the labor overlaps. Depth cannot be retrofitted. Neither can a corner. The industry reference designers plan from, the NKBA planning guidelines, treats functional storage, clear floor spaces and equipment location as separate design decisions, and a reface touches none of the three.

The Surfaces Sitting Beside New Doors

New doors change what the rest of the kitchen looks like next to them. The countertop stays, the backsplash stays, the floor stays, and a laminate counter that read as neutral for twenty years reads as old the day the shaker doors go on. That is the most common regret after a reface, and it is a sequencing problem rather than a quality one.

You can put a new counter on refaced cabinets, but the two jobs constrain each other. Stone fabricators work off the boxes you already have: the old top has to come off first, with time built in to repair cabinets damaged in the removal, and the runs have to be level before a slab can be set on them. Thirty-year-old boxes are not always level. Appliance openings are the other fixed dimension. A reface cannot widen the gap the refrigerator sits in, so a counter-depth model that needs more width is a cabinet job, not a door job.

A finished kitchen with a tall pantry cabinet beside a stainless refrigerator and two base drawers standing open under the countertop

How Long the Result Holds

Refacing has a reputation for aging badly, and its lifespan is decided by two things nobody looks at in a showroom: the surface and the preparation under it. A film-wrapped door beside a heat source and a veneer laid over a frame that was never sanded flat both fail early, and visibly, at an edge or a corner where the eye goes first. The same job on a flat frame, in a material chosen for where it sits, lasts as long as a new kitchen's doors, because past the surface there is no difference.

The part that does not get longer is the box. A reface resets the visible age of the kitchen and none of the actual age of the cabinet, so a carcass with fifteen good years left has fifteen good years left afterward. That is fine when the fronts are the complaint. It is expensive when the boxes were the complaint and the doors got blamed.

What Davie Humidity Adds to This

Most of the older kitchens here were built with particleboard boxes, and particleboard is the material that cares most about the air around it. The EPA's guidance for houses is to keep indoor relative humidity below 60 percent, ideally between 30 and 50, which in Broward is something the air conditioning does rather than the weather. A cabinet that has spent three decades under a sink in this climate has been tested harder than the same cabinet in a dry state, and it is the reason the check under the sink comes before the door catalog rather than after it.

A finished kitchen with a stainless undermount sink set into a quartz countertop under a window, white shaker doors on the sink base below it

Where refacing sits among the three ways to deal with the cabinets you have, and what the other two cost you in time, is on our Davie kitchen remodeling page.

Common Questions

How long does cabinet refacing last in a Davie kitchen?

It depends on the surface and on what the crew did to the face frames first. Solid wood doors on frames that were sanded flat last as long as the doors on a new kitchen, because past the surface there is nothing different about them. Rigid thermofoil beside a heat source is the short end of the range, and it fails by peeling at an edge, which cannot be repaired. The clock nobody counts is the boxes: they keep the age they already had, so the kitchen lasts as long as its worst component, and that is usually not the door.

Can refaced cabinets end up looking cheap in a Davie kitchen?

Yes, and almost always for one of two reasons that have nothing to do with the doors. The first is exposed end panels left in the original finish while everything else is new, which tells anyone who walks in exactly what was done. The second is contrast with what stayed: new fronts next to an original laminate counter make the counter look worse than it did before. Refacing looks cheap when it is done to part of a kitchen. Done to every visible surface in the room, nobody can tell.

Can I put a new countertop on refaced cabinets in Davie?

Usually yes, and it is worth deciding before the doors are ordered. The old top has to come off, which can damage the cabinets it was glued to, and the runs have to be level before a fabricator will set stone on them. Both are easier to handle while the kitchen is already open for the reface. The exception is a box that is not sound enough to carry the weight, which is what the sink base check settles.

Recent Kitchen Remodeling Projects in Davie

Kitchen opened to the living room, with a seated island Luxury kitchen remodeling
Galley kitchen opened up on one wall Galley kitchen remodeling
Island cabinetry with seating and a full perimeter run Kitchen island cabinetry
Refaced cabinets, shaker fronts and a tile backsplash Cabinet refacing

Cabinets refinished in navy under the existing granite Cabinet refinishing
Drawer bank under the cooktop, pantry beside the fridge Custom kitchen cabinets
Counter at two heights, open underneath Accessible kitchen remodeling
A wider walkway between the wall run and the island Kitchen layout redesign

None of this is an argument against refacing. It is the list of questions worth asking before you sign, because every one of them is cheaper to answer at the measurement than after the doors are hanging. What a reface covers here, which lines belong in the quote, and what moves the number are laid out on our Davie cabinet refacing page, along with the check that decides whether your boxes are candidates at all.

Want to know what a reface would leave you with?

Send a photo of your base cabinets with two drawers pulled open, and tell us what you dislike about using the kitchen. You will hear which complaints new doors would fix and which ones they would leave exactly where they are.

Call (786) 780-2728