What Cabinet Refacing Actually Is
Cabinet refacing keeps the cabinet boxes and changes everything you can see. The old doors and drawer fronts come off and are replaced with new ones. The exposed faces of the boxes — the vertical stiles and horizontal rails of the face frames, the end panels at the ends of a run, the toe kicks along the floor — are covered in a veneer or laminate matched to the new doors. New hinges go on, new pulls or knobs go on, and the kitchen is finished. Nothing is torn out, the plumbing is never disconnected, and the countertop stays exactly where it is.
The result is a cabinet run that looks new from every angle you actually stand at, for somewhere between a third and a half of what replacing the cabinetry would cost. The trade-off is honest and worth stating plainly: cabinet refacing cannot change your layout. If the island is in the wrong place or you want a bank of drawers where a cupboard is now, refacing is the wrong product and no amount of veneer will fix it.
Columbus, Georgia has 92,031 housing units, and 47,970 of them — 52.1% — were built between 1960 and 1999. That one number is the whole case for cabinet refacing in this city. Kitchens from those four decades were built with face-framed cabinet boxes out of plywood and solid lumber, screwed to the wall and to each other, square and immovable. What has aged is the part you can see: the doors, the drawer fronts, the finish and the hardware. The cabinet boxes behind them are frequently better made than what a big-box store will sell you to replace them.
Older than that and it gets more interesting rather than less. 5,791 Columbus homes — 6.3% of everything standing — date to 1939 or earlier, and another 4,997 went up in the 1940s. In Wynnton, Dinglewood and the streets around Lakebottom Park you meet site-built cabinets: no boxes at all in the modern sense, just face frames nailed to the wall framing with shelves behind. Those can often be refaced beautifully, but they have to be looked at rather than measured off a photograph. Meanwhile 60,431 of the city's units — 65.7% — are single-family detached houses, which is the housing type cabinet refacing suits best.
Kitchen Cabinet Refacing, Step by Step
Most people have never watched a cabinet refacing job happen and imagine it as a small renovation. It is closer to a careful, dusty joinery job that stays out of your way.
- Measure and specify. Every cabinet door and drawer front is measured individually, because cabinet openings from the 1960s and 1970s are rarely the sizes a catalogue expects. Door style, material, colour and hardware get chosen at the same visit.
- Build off site. The new cabinet doors and drawer fronts are made and finished in a shop over one to three weeks. Nothing happens in your kitchen during that stretch, which is the part of the timeline people forget to ask about.
- Strip the fronts. On the first day on site the old cabinet doors, drawer fronts and hinges come off and the face frames are cleaned and sanded flat. This is the noisy, dusty day of a cabinet refacing job, and it is the only one.
- Veneer the boxes. Matching veneer or laminate is cut and bonded to the face frames, end panels and toe kicks. Good work here is what makes the cabinet boxes read as new rather than as old boxes wearing new doors.
- Hang, align, finish. New cabinet doors go on new hinges and are adjusted until the gaps are even across the whole cabinet run, drawer fronts are set, pulls are drilled and fitted, and scribe moulding closes the joints against walls and ceilings.
Which Columbus Cabinets Reface Well, and Which Do Not
The single question that decides a cabinet refacing job is not the age of the kitchen or the style of the doors. It is whether the cabinet boxes are still sound, because the boxes are the only thing a reface keeps.
- Reface well: face-framed cabinet boxes in plywood or solid lumber, the standard in Columbus kitchens built from the 1950s through the 1980s. These cabinets hold a hinge screw indefinitely and take veneer beautifully.
- Reface well, with a look first: site-built cabinets in pre-war houses, and melamine-faced particleboard cabinet boxes from the 1990s. Both can be excellent candidates and both have to be inspected rather than assumed.
- Do not reface: any cabinet whose base has been wet. A sink-base cabinet with a swollen, delaminating floor cannot carry a new door, and veneering it hides a problem instead of fixing one.
- Do not reface: a kitchen whose layout you dislike. New cabinet doors will make a kitchen you resent look considerably more expensive, and it will still be in the wrong order.
Columbus Humidity and What It Does to Cabinet Doors
Columbus sits on the Chattahoochee River at the fall line, in a humid subtropical climate that delivers roughly 49 to 51 inches of rain a year and runs uncomfortably humid from June through August. That matters more to cabinets than most people expect, and any cabinet refacing quote that ignores it is a quote written somewhere else.
Wood moves with moisture. A solid timber door panel in a Columbus kitchen swells across its width in August and shrinks back in January, and if it was painted as one rigid slab the paint line at the panel edge cracks open and shows a hairline of bare wood every winter. That is why paint-grade cabinet doors built for this climate use a solid wood frame around an MDF centre panel — the frame gives you the Shaker profile, the stable centre stops the seasonal crack. It is also why a factory-sprayed and properly cured finish outlasts one brushed on in a July kitchen with the windows open. Ask where the cabinet doors are finished before you sign anything.
Older Columbus Cabinets: Site-Built Casework in Wynnton and Dinglewood
Columbus has a deep pre-war housing stock and it changes the cabinet conversation. In Wynnton, Wynn's Hill-Overlook, Dinglewood and the blocks around Lakebottom Park you find kitchens where the cabinetry was built in place by a carpenter rather than delivered in boxes. There is no carcass to speak of: face frames are nailed to the wall studs and the shelves sit on cleats behind them.
Those kitchens reface well, and often better than a 1990s builder kitchen does, because the timber is dense old-growth stock that holds a screw, and the cabinet fronts are usually the only tired thing about them. What they need is somebody who looks first. Opening sizes vary by a quarter inch across a single run, the face frames are rarely plumb, and the new cabinet doors have to be made to the openings that exist rather than the ones a catalogue assumes. Nobody can quote that honestly from a photograph.
Do You Need a Licensed Contractor for Cabinet Work in Georgia?
This is the part worth reading before you call anybody, including us, because cabinet refacing sits on the wrong side of a line that most smaller home jobs never reach.
- Georgia's threshold is $2,500. Under O.C.G.A. 43-41-2(9), a “residential contractor” is anyone whose work or compensation on a job exceeds $2,500.00, and that work requires a state license from the Georgia State Licensing Board for Residential and General Contractors. A typical Columbus cabinet refacing job is $4,000 to $10,000 — two to four times over the line.
- There is a genuine repair exemption, and it comes with a condition. O.C.G.A. 43-41-17(g) allows unlicensed repair work, but only where the work does not affect the structural integrity of the property and the person doing it discloses to the owner that they hold no license. Board Rule Chapter 553-8 requires that disclosure to be made in writing. If a cabinet company is working under the repair exemption, Georgia law says they have to tell you so on paper.
- An unlicensed contract is unenforceable against you. O.C.G.A. 43-41-17(b) makes a contract for licensable work signed by an unlicensed contractor unenforceable in law or equity by that contractor, and states that no lien or bond claim shall exist in their favour. Read that as consumer protection, because that is what it is.
So the useful question on a cabinet refacing job in Georgia is short: is this over $2,500, and if so, what is your license number? Licenses are searchable free through the Georgia Secretary of State. If the answer is the repair exemption, ask for the written disclosure the rule requires. Insurance is the separate question and it matters at every price — the independent provider who takes your cabinet job carries general liability cover and you are entitled to ask for the certificate.
One more question worth asking, and it is specific to older Columbus houses. Roughly 59,614 homes here — 64.8% of the housing stock — were built before 1980, which straddles the 1978 cutoff the federal lead-paint rules use. Sanding old painted cabinet doors in a pre-1978 house is exactly the kind of work those rules cover. Ask whether the firm doing the sanding is an EPA Lead-Safe Certified firm and how they plan to contain the dust. This site holds no certification of any kind and is not telling you it does — it is telling you what to ask the person who shows up.
Cabinet Refacing Across Columbus and the Chattahoochee Valley
Cabinet refacing is dispatched across the consolidated Columbus–Muscogee County area and out into the Chattahoochee Valley: Columbus, Fort Benning, Fortson, Midland, Upatoi, Cataula, Ellerslie, Hamilton, Waverly Hall and Pine Mountain in Georgia, plus Phenix City and Smiths Station across the river in Alabama. Columbus and Muscogee County are the same government — Georgia's first consolidated city-county, merged in 1971 — so “city” here means the whole county: 203,711 people and 92,031 housing units, inside a metro area of 325,615. The cabinet work does not change when you cross the state line at the Chattahoochee; the drive time does, so say where you are when you call.
One local note that shapes a lot of this work: 40,025 of Columbus's 81,415 occupied homes are rented — 49.2%, a share driven by Fort Benning, which was renamed Fort Moore in 2023 and restored to Fort Benning by a Defense Department memorandum in March 2025. A rental kitchen that turns over every two or three years is a natural cabinet refacing candidate: landlords get a kitchen that shows like new for a fraction of replacement, and the work fits inside the gap between tenants.