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How to Refresh Your Kitchen Cabinets

Give your kitchen cabinet doors a makeover with new hardware, a fresh finish and some creative accents without refacing.

By Sam Satterwhite
From The Family Handyman

About This Project

For about $6 per cabinet door, you can freshen up the look of your kitchen, and it won't be out of commission while you work. Put on new hinges and pulls, clean all the kitchen grime off, apply a new finish, and cut decorative grooves.

Short of a major addition, remodeling a kitchen is the most expensive home improvement project you’ll ever undertake. And by far the most expensive part of this project is replacing or refacing the cabinets -- so what’s the solution? There are millions of kitchens that could be brought out of the Dark Ages if the cabinets received new hardware, a good cleaning, a fresh finish and perhaps some creative accents.

This article will tell you how to perform this cosmetic kitchen surgery for only $6 and 30 minutes per door or drawer. For this average kitchen, the whole project took 20 hours and $250. Another benefit is that your kitchen won’t be out of commission while you work.

For this makeover, I removed and replaced all the hinges and handles, cleaned and refinished the doors, and cut and painted grooves in the faces. The plain-looking kitchen was reborn with a more stylish Craftsman appearance.

Goof-Proofing Tip:
Before you remove the doors and drawers, mark their location with a tape label and place it on the back.

How Far Should You Go?
One of the nicest features of this project is that you can take it as far as you want. For instance, you can stop after simply cleaning and refinishing the doors. On these doors, I noticed a dramatic difference simply after cleaning off 35 years of kitchen grease, grime and broken-down finish -- this cleaning made the wood grain reappear after years in hiding. The wood grain stood out even more after the finish coats were applied. However, the birch plywood doors on these cabinets have a very subtle grain pattern, unlike oak or ash, so I decided they needed more drama and added the painted grooves for contrast. Your doors may not need that extra help. Or maybe you can develop your own groove pattern.

I replaced the old hinges on these cabinets with new self-closing ones. Self-closing hinges are convenient and less obtrusive. They also let you toss all those old door catches that get in the way when you use your cabinets.

Choosing New Hardware
Goof-Proofing Tip:
You can also fill the old hinge and knob holes using wax sticks. It’s easier to fill a hole level with wax and you won’t need to spot-finish afterward. However, wax sticks come in only eight colors and you can’t blend them for an exact match.

The kind of doors you have will dictate your hinge choice. The doors you see here, very common on older standard cabinets, have a 3/8-in. rabbeted inset with a 3/8-in. overlay. This type of door makes using a completely concealed hinge problematic, if not impossible. So, I chose face-mounted hinges made for an inset door. To make the face-mounted hinges less obtrusive, I used black lines and black knobs, plus a hinge color that blends with the wood. This method works because the black details draw attention away from the hinges. Face-mounted hinges are available at home centers and lumberyards for $3 a pair.

If your doors don’t have the routed inset, but instead have a partial or full overlay, you’ll use a different type of hinge. You may want to use a concealed, cup-style hinge that mounts to the cabinet’s interior. These hinges cost $5 to $8 a pair and are available at lumberyards and woodworking stores. They require some special tools and are harder to install than face-mounted hinges, but they’re a good option if you want a higher-quality, adjustable hinge.


Tips and Tricks

Use a Jig for Fast, Accurate Knob Placement
I chose 1-1/4 in. black steel knobs ($3 at a home center) instead of pulls or handles for this project. Center the doorknobs so they fall on the diagonal line formed by the corner of the door and the intersection of the bottom and side grooves in the door face. Put drawer knobs in the exact center of the drawer. If your drawer faces are all the same height, you’ll need only one hole for drawer knobs in your jig.

The bolts that come with your knobs usually work fine on the doors, but drawer construction varies and you often need a longer screw for the drawer. Ideally, the screw should be 3/8 to 1/2 in. longer than the material is thick. So, measure your drawer thickness, then pick up some 1-1/4 or 1-1/2 in. x 8/32 in. bolts if needed.

Watch for Trouble Spots
We found three potential trouble spots in this project:

If you have an ornate valance over the sink, you may want to remove it. The style may not work well with the project shown here.

Most sink cabinets have a false front above the doors. You’ll have to remove this piece to rout the grooves. Sometimes it will be held in place with wooden cleats that are easily turned. But other times it will be held with glued cleats, and you’ll have to use a chisel and a hammer to knock these cleats off, but the front will come out.

It’s also possible that you’ll have a pair of doors without a center stile. They usually have a pair of drawers above them that do have a gap between the drawer faces. This creates a problem with the groove alignment. To solve it, don’t cut vertical grooves on the sides of the drawer faces above the spot where the doors meet. This way, the drawer faces won’t have grooves that don’t line up; instead they’ll look more like the wide false front by the sink.

Goof-Proofing Tip:
If a new hinge hole happens to align with a larger existing hole on the face frame, clean out the old hole. Next, put dabs of glue on the ends of toothpicks and break the toothpick tips off in the hole. Then drive the new screw.

Selecting a Finish
For our project, I used amber-tinted shellac as a primer. Shellac will stick to any kind of finish, so you don’t need to know what’s on your cabinets (though it’s probably lacquer). Also, the amber tint added a warm, rich color to the doors.

When you buy the shellac, don’t stir it. It contains settled wax on the bottom that may interfere with the final finish. Separate the good finish by pouring off the clearer liquid into a separate container. Don’t use the milky cream at the bottom of the can.

For the final finish, I used water-based polyurethane because shellac by itself isn’t durable enough for a kitchen. Water-based polyurethane is very tough, and since both it and shellac are fast-drying, the finish is less likely to attract dust (and you can use your kitchen sooner).

Special Tools and Materials
Sharp chisel


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