Kitchen Cabinet Refacing vs Replacement: Costs, Pros and Cons for UK Kitchens

Take the doors off a fifteen-year-old kitchen and you learn the truth in ninety seconds. Carcasses square, dry and holding screws? A £2,500 job. Base unit under the sink crumbling under a thumb? A £12,000 one, and no set of new doors will change that.

Refacing — what UK suppliers usually call door replacement or a kitchen facelift — keeps the carcasses, worktop runs and services exactly where they are, changing only what you see and touch. Replacement takes the room back to bare plaster. The choice has less to do with taste than a showroom suggests and far more to do with 18mm melamine-faced chipboard you cannot currently see.

Refacing gets you new doors and drawer fronts, hinges, handles, end panels, plinth and cornice, and often a new worktop and sink. The units stay put. A fitter turns round a 15-door kitchen in one to two days; a DIYer working weekends takes three or four.

Replacement means strip-out, disposal, making good the plaster, usually reworking sockets and waste, then new units, worktop, splashback and appliances — five to eight days for the fitter plus trades either side. It is the only route that changes layout, so it answers a bad plan rather than a tired finish. If layout is your real complaint, start with how to plan a kitchen remodel before pricing doors.

Figures below are for a typical UK semi: around 15 doors and drawer fronts across a four-metre run and a short return.

• •Cost: refacing £1,200–£3,500 DIY-fitted, or £3,500–£8,000 through a refacing company with worktop and sink. Replacement £6,500–£16,000 fitted.
• •Kitchen out of action: refacing 1–3 days, hob and sink usable most evenings. Replacement 1–3 weeks, a £250–£400 skip and a fortnight of microwave meals.
• •Layout: refacing changes nothing — sink, hob and unit widths stay put. Replacement changes anything you can afford.
• •Lifespan: refaced doors 10–15 years; a well-fitted new kitchen 20–25 years before it looks dated rather than worn out.
• •Resale: a refaced kitchen photographs as well as a new one, but a surveyor opening a cupboard sees the old carcass.

Everything hinges on the carcasses. Empty one base unit and one wall unit, take a torch and a screwdriver, and run these before anyone quotes.

• •Hinge plates: undo a screw and refit it. If it spins without biting, the chipboard is chewed and new doors will sag within a year.
• •Under the sink: press the base panel hard. Sponginess, swollen edges or lifting melamine means that unit is finished.
• •Squareness: measure both diagonals of an opening. More than about 3mm out and the reveals will never look right.
• •Widths: refacing locks you into the existing 300/400/500/600mm modules. Want a 900mm pan drawer bank? That means replacement.
• •Drawer boxes: old metal-sided runners will not take a soft-close upgrade. Allow £25–£45 per drawer for a new box and runner.

Headline prices flatter refacing; lifespans flatter replacement. Cost per year of service is the fairer test.

On any sound kitchen, refacing wins on that measure. It loses only when someone refaces a kitchen that needed replacing and pays twice inside five years — a classic among kitchen remodelling mistakes to avoid. Full-job figures sit in our kitchen remodel cost guide, and unit pricing in how much kitchen cabinets cost.

• •Reface: £2,800 in year one for painted MDF doors, soft-close hinges, handles and a fitted laminate worktop, plus about £400 at year eight for two damp-damaged units. Ten-year total £3,200, or £320 a year.
• •Replace: £11,500 for a mid-range trade kitchen with quartz worktop and installation, plus a £120 tap by year ten. That is £1,160 a year over ten, but £530 across a realistic 22-year life.
• •Reface now, replace later: £2,800 today, replacement at year ten for perhaps £14,000. Dearer across twenty years, but it defers the big spend.

This is where people get hurt or end up with an unsafe kitchen, so draw the line plainly.

The sensible middle path: do the doors, hinges and handles yourself, pay a fitter £180–£280 a day for the worktop, and a Gas Safe engineer £90–£150 for the hob.

• •DIY: measuring and ordering. Buy one sample door first; batch colour varies more than suppliers admit.
• •DIY: swapping doors, fronts, handles and 110-degree soft-close hinges. Bore the 35mm cups with a Forstner bit in a hinge jig; freehand drilling ruins doors.
• •DIY: end panels, plinth and cornice, repainting doors with a de-glosser and two coats of water-based satin, and fitting a laminate worktop with a hired jig and router.
• •Professional only: gas. Disconnecting or reconnecting a hob must be done by a Gas Safe registered engineer — that is the law, not best practice.
• •Professional only: new circuits or consumer unit work, notifiable under Part P in England and Wales and needing a registered electrician or building control sign-off.
• •Professional only: quartz, granite and sintered stone. Cutting releases respirable crystalline silica; templating belongs in a workshop with water suppression and proper RPE.
• •Professional only: moving soil or waste pipes, meeting Part F extraction of 30 litres a second over the hob, and structural work such as removing a wall.
• •Professional only: suspected asbestos. Textured coatings, old floor tiles and black bitumen adhesive in anything fitted before 2000 get tested, not chiselled.

Vinyl-wrapped MDF is the cheapest refacing door at £25–£60, and it fails predictably: the foil lifts at the edges above the oven and beside the dishwasher within five to eight years unless a heat deflector strip is fitted. Sprayed MDF at £60–£120 handles steam far better and takes a brush touch-up; solid oak at £90–£180 shrugs off knocks but moves with humidity in a cold kitchen.

A new kitchen ages better because everything ages together. Either way, two habits add years: wipe spills off the plinth line before they wick into the chipboard, and leave the dishwasher shut until the steam settles. Sorting the insides while the doors are off costs nothing — our kitchen cupboard organisation guide covers zoning that lasts.

On a kitchen under about twenty years old with dry, square carcasses, refacing is the better-value job by a wide margin — roughly 85% of the visual change for a quarter of the money. On soft chipboard, a layout that irritates you daily, or doors already swapped once, replacement is the only option that lasts. Do the five checks this weekend, then work through the kitchen remodel checklist before ordering.

• •Reface if: the carcasses pass all five checks, the layout suits you, and the budget is under £4,000.
• •Reface if: you are selling and want the kitchen to photograph well without spending money the sale price will not return.
• •Replace if: a unit is water damaged, you want an island or the sink moved, or the units are 1990s chipboard on their second set of doors.
• •Replace if: you are retiling, replastering or relaying the floor anyway — new units then cost less extra than they look.