Helping you choose the best cabinets for your kitchen
Laminate Kitchen Cabinets: Painting, Refinishing or Refacing
Many people own kitchens with laminate kitchen cabinets that are looking tired and old, but are still sturdy and don’t warrant replacement.
What to do?
You can paint or re-face your laminate cabinets, or buy new doors and drawer fronts, and get a whole new look without the expense, work and hassle of replacing the cabinets.
Painting
The most important part when painting cabinets of any kind is the preparation, and this goes double with laminate cabinets as inadequate preparation will cause all your hard work painting to be for naught – the paint will simply peel off. Preparation of the laminate involves roughening the surface with sandpaper and then using a special primer to bond to the laminate surface and give a good substrate for the finish coats of paint. Special paint is also available for painting on top of laminate.
If you’re going to paint, you might want to consider changing the style of your doors beforehand. Do you have the oak or metal pull strips along the bottom or top edge of the doors or drawers? These are a dead giveaway of 80′s style laminate cabinets. You could remove them and replace with plain wood, fill the join between the new wood strip and the door surface, then paint over the whole lot and use new knobs or pulls as handles. You could also use thin wood strips like lath, glued to the door like a picture frame, to give the effect of a shaker frame-and-panel door style. Once filled and painted, no-one will know that the “frame” was added later.
Refacing with Laminate
Simply gluing new laminate in a new color and style over the old is a fast and simple way to change your cabinets. New water-based contact cement is much safer and more pleasant to work with than the old solvent based glues and is quite adequate for gluing on the new laminate. Make sure you remove the doors and drawer fronts so you can work on them horizonatlly, to make the task easier, and clean the old surface well before gluing to get rid of grease or dirt that will prevent proper adhesion. You may also want to add matching edge banding: check that there’s enough clearance between the doors and drawer fronts to give space for the new thickness. You may be able to adjust hinges to give you more space.
Refacing with Wood
It’s possible to buy wood veneers of many species which you glue on to your doors and drawers, plus edge banding to match, in the same way as the new laminate. You’ll then need to stain and finish the wood as desired. If your cabinets are face frame construction rather than “euro” style boxes, you can reface the frames too.
New doors and drawer fronts
If your doors and drawers are beat up but the cabinet boxes are in good shape, consider buying new doors and drawer fronts in a new style, material and color to completely transform your kitchen. This is more expensive than refacing or painting, but may be less work and give you a better result in the long run.
