trying to spruce up kitchen cabinets - question...

[Jared Martin]

So our house was built in the late 70s. We have a large kitchen which works well for us. Problem is that the cabinets are awful. Dark particleboard with 1/2" face frames. We definitely don't have the money to replace the cabinets but I thought that I could build new drawers and cabinet doors and that might at least give a better look without breaking the bank. They're painted white already (raw dark particleboard inside) and I'd be looking to paint the inside white as well to lighten up everything and hopefully make things look a little less cheap.

The carcasses do seem to be in good shape (solid, level, not coming apart, etc). Am I crazy thinking that this would be a good idea? Thought about refacing things myself, but I think that would be a bit of an ambitious project for me (have a 9 month old baby in the house, so free time is a precious commodity nowadays).

Are there any decent soft-close hinges (Blum, etc) that can be mounted to 1/2" face frames? From what I've seen, no, but maybe I missed something. I figured I'd have to add blocks to the back of the face frames where the hinges would attach to thicken them to 3/4".

Thanks for any thoughts or guidance.

Jared

[Jamie Buxton]

You might look at separate soft-close devices -- that is, ones that are not built in to the hinge. For instance http://www.wwhardware.com/blumotion-for-doors-b970

[Jared Martin]

You might look at separate soft-close devices -- that is, ones that are not built in to the hinge. For instance http://www.wwhardware.com/blumotion-for-doors-b970

Thanks. I saw those. I figured if I was going to go to the trouble of rebuilding cabinet doors and boxes, might as well use an "all-in-one" system, but might be worth a look.

[Scott Austin]

I would just add 1/4" to back of face frame. I redid my inlaws existing cabinets a month ago. It was a lot of work, I made new doors for the whole kitchen. I used the biggest overlay hinge I could get by with to cover up more of the face frame w/ the filled holes from the existing hinges.

The painting was a lot of work. I did 2 coats of shellac based primer & 2 coats of Benjamin Moore Advanced latex enamel.

[Dan Hahr]

The cost of good paint, hardware, and time is more than those cabinets will ever be worth. If you are capable, begin planning to build new ones yourself. The time it will take you to do all that repair and painting will be comparable to what it would take to build some simple, flat panel door cabinets out of wood and plywood. If you don't have lavish tastes, you can make a pretty nice kitchen for less than $2000. However, if you are wanting to put some Blum quality slow close stuff on your current cabinets, you could spend several hundreds on something that you won't even be looking at most of the time. By the way, you can rebuild them in sections, using the old ones for templates.

Dan

[Jim Matthews]

My kitchen is a similar age.

The cabinets are all covered by full panel doors.
They were stripped and repainted with a Latex Enamel.

Every one of them has paint separations, where the panels moved.

If you must paint, get the panels done before assembly.