Reface Cabinets

"We started talking with the customers about a refacing job, but their island really needed to be replaced to meet their needs. We could have replaced the island and refaced the rest, but they also wanted the wall cabinets to go up to their 9' ceiling. The decision was made to tear it all out and replace with new custom built cabinets. We have a firm rule about not tearing out any cabinets until all the replacement cabinets are built and delivered. This prevents situations where the customer's kitchen is ripped up for weeks waiting for necessary pieces. This was a fairly large kitchen with a 10' island and we got everything ripped out and all the new cabinets installed in 5 working days from our committed start date. This was a great project, and the customers were wonderful to work with."

"In addition to the stained Maple refacing work, the customer had us add a set of LeMans II blind corner organizers. These are a great way to provide access into a corner, where one set of cabinets runs behind the other. The LeMans II pull outs are not inexpensive but in certain configurations they offer the best access into a blind corner. As she mentioned, getting the exact stain desired was an iterative process involving a few samples. The 25 year old cabinets were a very light stained wood, with a white Pickle over them. If you aren't familiar with a Pickle you can Google for photos. But basically it appears to be a very light whitewash put over the stain. She wanted the stain to be close in color to what she had before but with no trace of white in it. Unlike solid colors where a customer can specify a paint code for us to match to, with a custom stain, the customer will work with our paint shop to come up with the exact stain color they are looking for. We do have samples of many stains we have done, and a lot of customers pick one and that is that. But we are happy to do custom stains, as well as custom solid color finishes, or glazes, when the customer is looking for something unique. Regarding finishes; We moved away from standard lacquers to what are called conversion varnish finishes about 3 1/2 years ago. The conversion varnish finishes are just much more durable. The CV finishes cost us a little more to do, but we make up for that in reduced warranty work. If you are considering refacing with another vendor, pin them down about exactly what they use to do their finish work. Factory built wood cabinet makers made the change to CV finishes, a few years ago, but there are still a lot people finishing in the older lacquer products. If a cabinet or refacing company tells you that precat lacquer finishes are "good enough" you may want to keep looking."

"Was a pleasure to work with you on your kitchen project. Thank you for posting your review of our services."

"Was a pleasure to work with you on your kitchen project. Thank you for posting your review of our services."

"This was an interesting project, to redo the kitchen in an older home in the [Member Information Removed] area. The lower cabinets were of good quality so we refaced them, and built new upper cabinets, along with a new pantry piece. The new cabinets went up to the 9' ceiling and we also vented her cooking hood to the outdoors. Also replaced all the drawers with new Baltic birch drawers with dovetailed corners on Blum soft close glides. There were enough changes that we brought in a kitchen designer to create 3D renderings for the customer's approval. Her new kitchen came out beautiful, and I estimate the customer would have had to spend about 60% more if she'd elected to rip out everything and put in all new high quality cabinets such as ours. Many of our jobs are straight refacing, but this one typified a lot of jobs where the customer wants replace some cabinets or make some change such as replacing a desk with a pantry and then reface the rest of the kitchen. Whether refacing or new cabinets, we always use real hardwood doors, and our new cabinets are of 3/4" maple construction."

"Thank you very much for posting. It's very rewarding to us see reviews like this."

"This refacing job gave us the opportunity to transform a dated natural stained maple kitchen to a beautiful fancy solid off white design with a contrasting island. It was a large project and involved making new cabinet space on the other side of the kitchen for a large sub zero 54" wide fridge/freezer combo and then re-purposing the old fridge case into a custom pantry with 6 wide full extension pull outs. Additionally we refaced the laundry room and an upstairs bath. The customer choose mitered doors and matching drawer fronts and had us replace all their drawers with new dovetailed boxes on Blum Blumotion soft close glides."

"The customers chose a beautiful finish called a shade stain for their refacing job. We had some issues on this job such as three door vendor mistakes (two in a row on a remake drawer front piece) and our finishing facility missed a wood blemish on what should have been the correct remake piece. The customers got frustrated with everything, and we had to work to regain their trust. Everything came out well in the end, but the job almost seemed jinxed. Our suppliers are long term valued partners of ours and normally deliver great products for to our customers, or we would have new vendors."

"This was a great project to be involved with. We initially came out to replace some truly horrid custom cabinet work on one side of her kitchen, and reface the other side which were really decent cabinets. Once we did color renderings and showed her what the new cabinets would be like she decided to do a complete rip out and replacement instead of refacing the others to match the new. We worked through several iterations of design and came up with a great design with quite a few fancy design details. The center piece is a 48" wide functional wood vent hood with corbels, and newel posts on the cabinet below. An outstanding design detail was the addition of four glass doors with curved mullions. All the cabinets we delivered were constructed of 3/4" maple which is how we build all our cabinets, unless the customer specifies some different hardwood. This was not a big kitchen but the level of detail was very high. The price reported is accurate if you add 3 zeros to it."

"This was a beautiful job featuring fancy doors with applied rope moldings. As the customer mentioned we had a delay. We thought their doors were ordered, but the door vendor was waiting on a final approval from us. This didn't come to light till a few days before we were expecting the doors into the finish shop. We have since modified our procedures to make sure that a missing confirmation from the door shop will be recognized earlier in the process."

"We don't do many real Cherry jobs which is a shame because they are beautiful. Cherry does cost more than Maple. We can stain Maple any color that Cherry could be, but Maple just doesn't have that complex swirled grain structure of Cherry."