by soldierant

A Truly Green Kitchen…your Friends Will Envy

As a kitchen designer for the last eight years, shoulder to shoulder with my clients I have battled a myriad of kitchen remodeling challenges: soffits, out of level floors, windows over stoves, chimneys and pipe chases to name a few. I love it when my client rattles off five or six things about their existing kitchen design that they absolutely hate. I now know exactly what to avoid in their kitchen remodel, and I know there is nothing I have found yet that I can't fix with a new kitchen layout! I never looked for alternative solutions such as kitchen refacing, why would I? Selling cabinets was part of my job. And if anyone brought up kitchen refacing, it became very clear:  I was a kitchen cabinet refacing snob.

If asked, I would explain simply to the customer, that the kitchen refacing process was nearly as expensive as a full kitchen remodel, and after all the mess and inconvenience involved in kitchen reface, you ended up with basically the same kitchen design you had before, who would want that? The kitchen cabinet refacing service provided by most companies, I explained pretty much like this:

remove old doors and drawers fronts
sand cabinet surfaces,
smear with glue,
slap up plain laminate
install new doors and drawer fronts
leave customer with same old floor, counter top, layout and basic look 

   …and then, the nice folks generally purchased a new kitchen.  The neighbors new it was coming the moment I had a 30 yard dumpster dropped in Mr. and Mrs. Happy Kitchen-Customers driveway. A typical kitchen remodel takes between six and twelve weeks, and the dumpster often remains there for almost the whole time, just to be sure that all the debris was properly removed.

My limited knowledge of the kitchen refacing process had me mentally confined to a pen, and I couldn’t see beyond it.In fact, it wasn't until I began to work for Empire Kitchen & Bath, Union, New Jersey that I began to see a different way, more custom, a whole new added value in the kitchen reface process. It took a little time and understanding of the approach, and one main rule to qualify a cabinet refacing candidate, the kitchen cabinet boxes had to be in "good" condition, and in fact many older kitchen cabinets have full plywood construction, or solid wood, far higher quality than what most homeowners will manage to afford in a brand new kitchen cabinet. That meant clearly that structurally the refaced kitchen would have more strength and intergity. Other than that, I learned there wasn't much I couldn't do in a reface kitchen and the process really went more like this:

remove all old doors and drawer front and drawer boxes
sand all exposed areas as per plans
finish interiors of any cabinets with glass doors
make plumbing & electrical upgrades as per plans
add custom reface cabinets and make necessary modifications to existing cabinets
refrigerator gets concealed behind custom panels and a new deep cabinet installed above it
new flooring is installed
high Pressure Laminate or wood paneling is applied (refaced)to all exposed cabinet surfaces as per plan
new Doors are installed with concealed European hinges
new solid wood dovetailed drawers with full extension soft close drawer glides are installed
new drawer faces are installed
new counter top surface of customers choosing is installed
new roll out trays, base wastebaskets, vegetable bins, liter bottle pullouts, spice racks, cutlery dividers, every convenience you can imagine is available and installed per plans
new crown molding and light rail
under cabinet lighting is installed
and a full custom back splash is added, tile, Corian, granite, customer's choice

   That sounded and looked to me much more like a newly remodeled kitchen, and with the right craftsmen on the job, I learned cabinets could swap out their old function for new in the blink of an eye. The fact that most of the kitchen is saved, means I don't contribute an extra 30+yards of trash to the landfill. A cabinet refacing crew generally brings back the debris in the back of their standard work van!      

The benefit to the environment is undeniable. This is the ultimate in recycling, and the array of choices of styles, colors, and finishes available rival any new cabinet manufacturer's offerings:

new crown molding and light rail
glazes
hand wiping
penciling
high gloss polyester lacquer paint
natural stains 

   One of the many benefits to Mr. and Mrs. Happy Kitchen-Customer is the amount of money they save on re-using the bones of their kitchen, it helps afford more bells and whistles in the finished product, kitchen accessories are key to good function and homeowners enjoy their use every day, rollouts, cutlery dividers, spice organizers, and pantry storage systems! Other benefits to consider are that it takes less time start to finish, an average of two and a half weeks to complete a kitchen refaces if they install a new counter top and back splash, the savings yielded also provides additional budget for counter top upgrades and beautiful hardware. Then there is the behind the scenes benefit to the environment, by not manufacturing new cabinet boxes, trees are spared, less cardboard is used, there is a savings on shipping, and the pollution from manufacturing is reduced dramatically. When the replacement doors and drawer fronts are purchased from a source that uses their factory excess to heat their factories and kilns, or re-sells its waste to say the pet industry, you have nearly closed the loop on unnecessary disposal.

These are some of the solutions we can look to more and more, the list of products is growing almost daily. While these solutions may not be for every client, they are for some, are they possibly for you? 

 Ask yourself, what else can I learn about kitchen refacing, is it for me? Is it for some of my clients? I know it is for some of mine.

1997.04.18 Release
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