Kitchen Cabinets - Ditch Them or What?

Okay some of you all are reading the blog and starting to ask great questions. Today someone asked under the Ask Suzanne place in the blog, what they should do with 26 year old kitchen cabinets? Sounds easy doesn't it--- Get out the sledge hammer!

Well not necessarily.

You know how therapists always seem to answer your question with a question. What kind kind of real estate therapist would I be if I didn't ask a few back at you?

Here are the questions related to this follower's question.

1. Do you like the layout of your current kitchen? By this, I mean where the sink, stove and refrigerator are located.
2. Do you plan on expanding the size of your Kitchen? knocking down walls, etc.
3. Are the shelves and the boxes that make up your cabinets in good condition? For example, do the drawers all open easily and are the shelves not warped?
4. Are your existing cabinets pretty standard in size?
5. Do you have a lot of money?


I ask these things for these reasons. Good Cabinets cost a lot of money. If you have cabinets that are 26 years old, but were good quality cabinets when they were installed, they still function well, and you just want to update them and not considering moving the location of all the other things in the kitchen -- then I would consider you a good candidate for refacing rather than a Total Ditching. You could save yourself a ton of cash and a lot of time. It's amazing how far cabinet refacing has come over the years. People used to think cabinet refacing and fear someone was coming into their home with rolls of contact paper! Well my friends no more.

Then again older good quality cabinets may just be better built than anything else out there. If you want sliding trays in the cabinets they can be retrofitted. 90% of all new cabinets are not solid wood anyway. Most of the time the high end stuff only has solid wood doors and drawer faces. If you are spending $10000+ to get soft close drawers then that's a lot of money to spend not to hear a drawer close. Besides with the money you save just going the refacing route you could probably buy yourself all new appliances!

Now as any good therapist would say our 50 minutes are up!