Kitchen Cabinets - Resurface or Replace?

This is a great way that you can save money when doing kitchens in buy-fix-sell properties as well as properties that you are wanting to hold on to for cashflow. Saving money when you can makes such a big deal to the overall profit on any deal that you may do.
By Pete Goode | This Old House – Wed, Jan 9, 2013
Mary Saunder disliked the cabinets in her kitchen from the moment she moved into her Bowie, Maryland, home. "They were metal, the color of bronze," Saunder says, "but my husband's motto was 'If it ain't broke don't fix it.'" When her husband passed away last February, Mary decided it was time to act. "I couldn't stand it anymore," she says. But rather than spend the $25,000 or $30,000 redoing the kitchen with new cabinets would have cost her, she settled on a simpler, cheaper and far less intrusive solution.
Motivated by a newspaper ad for Sears' kitchen-cabinet-refacing service, she scheduled an appointment and signed up. After two visits to take measurements and show her the new finish and hardware options she could choose from, Sears moved in. Two days and 29 cabinets later, Mary's kitchen was transformed. "I'm 100 percent satisfied," she says. Total cost: $9,100.
Mary Saunder is fairly typical of thousands of U.S. homeowners who make the decision each year to reface rather than replace their cabinets. "The truth is," says Gerald Baldner, founder and president of Kitchen Solvers, a refacing franchising firm in La Crosse, Wisconsin, "some of the cabinets built 20 and 30 years ago are more solidly constructed than most modular, prebuilt cabinets today. So when it's time to redo the kitchen, it often doesn't make sense to start from scratch."
The basic refacing project consists of installing new cabinet door and drawer fronts and covering the exposed face frames of the cabinets with a matching wood or plastic veneer. Most jobs take two to four days, depending on kitchen size and extras like replacing counters or adding an extra cabinet.
The work itself is a standardized progression of tasks, generally handled by one or two craftsmen. They begin by removing doors and drawer fronts from cabinets and roughing up the old finish on face frames and side panels to prepare them for the new covering. They then glue and sometimes nail the new finish over the old, the nail holes filled and the seams and edges trimmed to make them unobtrusive.
New panels or molding are used to trim out the exposed undersides of the upper cabinets to give them a finished look, and the base cabinet toekick is replaced. Finally, new cabinet doors and drawer fronts are attached, and new hardware is mounted on each of them.
When Refacing Doesn't Make Sense
Refacing isn't for every kitchen. Most important, it doesn't address the issue of a poor kitchen layout. "If you go to the expense of refacing and still end up with a nonfunctional kitchen, you've wasted your money," says Cyndi Cantley, of Cantley & Co., a certified kitchen designer in Birmingham, Alabama.
Other conditions that rule out refacing include existing cabinets that are beginning to fall apart or aren't well built to begin with; metal cabinets that are rusting; and larger structural issues, like floors that have settled and left cabinets out of kilter. If you have any of these problems, you shouldn't consider refacing.