We sell both, so we have no horse in this race — here are the three questions that actually decide it, with real Toronto numbers.
1. Are the boxes sound? Open a base cabinet and press the floor of it; check under the sink for swelling. Solid plywood or intact melamine boxes reface beautifully. Water-damaged particleboard does not deserve new doors.
2. Does the layout work? Refacing keeps every cabinet exactly where it stands. If you fight your kitchen daily — the dishwasher blocks the drawers, the corner is a black hole — new doors will not fix a bad plan.
3. What is the honest budget? If the number is under $20,000 and the first two answers are yes, refacing is usually the intelligent spend.
Cabinet refacing — new doors, drawer fronts, panels, and hardware on existing boxes — runs $6,000–$15,000 for a typical kitchen and takes 3–5 days, kitchen usable every evening.
New custom cabinetry starts around $12,000–$15,000 for the cabinetry alone, plus demolition, installation, and usually counters (old tops rarely survive removal) — realistically a $25,000+ project over 2–4 weeks. What you buy for the difference: a corrected layout, drawers where doors were, and storage engineered to the millimetre.
Reface the cabinets and replace the counter and backsplash. New stone, new tile, new doors and hardware — the kitchen reads fully renovated at roughly half the cost of starting over. It is our most-recommended package for kitchens under fifteen years old, and it pairs naturally with backsplash installation.
Water damage in more than one box, layouts that fight the cook, kitchens headed into a wall-removal renovation anyway, and 1970s metric-odd boxes that no standard door fits. In those cases refacing is money spent twice — we will say so at the inspection, in writing, for free.
