Kitchen Refacing Ideas

My kitchen is the beating heart of our home. Over time, this room has become the focus of our house, a place where people gather, cook, and live. Although our kitchen layout is functional with a working triangle, a spacious floor plan, and natural light, the dated finishes and mismatched countertops left a lot to be desired.

My husband Chase and I decided that we needed to put a personal stamp on the kitchen by bringing the nearly 20-year-old space into modern times and making it easier to live in.

The cabinets in our kitchen were rapidly aging, with a few even falling off the hinges and needing repairs. Some of the compressed wood and laminate covers were cracking and refused to close properly.

You can see below that when the builders put our kitchen together, they chose a laminate/wood combo countertop, which I think is pretty awful; it’s like they couldn’t decide what to do!

The grooved beadboard that acted as a backsplash throughout the space, catered to my farmhouse and craftsman-style tastes, but was extremely difficult to clean. Each time I scrubbed dirt and debris off the woods, a little paint and finish came with it.

I dreamt about a new space, and what I would put in it: new hardware, new cabinet doors and new countertops with snazzy tiled backsplash. Since our kitchen space functioned well, we didn’t need a full renovation or even extreme demo. We needed cabinet refacing, which is like a refreshing kitchen makeover!

Cabinet refacing is also much faster than a complete renovation, so the time our kitchen would be out of commission would be shorter than if we had torn out the cabinets and started from scratch. Since we have two small children and three pets, saving time and getting back to normal faster is what we wanted. There’s no “good time” to re-do your kitchen; you’re always using it!

Our next step was a free in-home consultation. A Home Depot associate came to our house, hands full of samples we could compare to our existing floors, fixtures and natural light.

Although there were tons of samples, it was easy to go through each material and narrow down my preferred colors, creating a “mood board” on my own kitchen table of what my refaced kitchen would look like.

The Home Depot associate then walked me through the step-by-step process of what a refacing really entailed: removal and haul away of our existing cabinet doors and hardware, the encasing of the cabinet boxes in veneer, the installation of countertops, backsplash, custom drawers, doors and hardware.

I started to get excited; this really was the plan for us!

The old cabinet doors were replaced with perfectly measured, solid wood doors in my chosen color, expertly installed and sporting the new copper-distressed cup pulls and knobs.

Swoooooon!

The new cabinet doors are so sophisticated and pair perfectly with the farmhouse-style I was going for. Add in the contrasting countertops, and I’m in LOVE! The kitchen’s new look is clean, modern, and much more my personal style. That’s not to mention the solid wood doors are custom built for my space and hang perfectly on the veneered cabinet boxes.

Now, I’m not afraid to scrub my kitchen clean after taco night! The new modern tile is not only gorgeous to look at, but it’s easy to wipe clean. The installers did a wonderful job of placing and grouting it. I don’t have any wooden countertop edges to stare at, either.

One of my favorite new spaces in the kitchen is the butler’s pantry. For one, having a kitchen large enough to accommodate such a space is a dream, but during the refacing I was able to reface these cabinets, too.

Although the cabinet refacing process we chose is a “smaller” version of a renovation, it’s amazing the enormous difference it can make. Some portions of my kitchen are nearly unrecognizable, but it still feels like home.

The upgraded finishes, cabinets and hardware go a long way to making this kitchen modern, fresh and more stylish. I have a hard time choosing my favorite part, but the countertops and backsplash are the most exciting.

What family-style dish should I make first in our new space?!

See the kitchen reface project unfold in just seconds in this video.