Kitchen Cabinet Refacing in Ottawa

Kitchen cabinet refacing keeps the cabinet boxes you already have and replaces what you see: new doors and drawer fronts, new hinges and pulls, and a veneer over the exposed faces of the boxes. In an Ottawa kitchen it is the right call when the layout works and the boxes are dry and square.

Move the sink, change an appliance size or find a swollen sink base, and you are replacing cabinets instead. Our page on kitchen renovation in Ottawa covers that bigger job, from the design visit to the final inspection.

What cabinet refacing includes

Home Depot Canada sells refacing as an installed service in Ottawa, and its service page splits the work into tiers. Whoever does the job, the split is a good map of it:

• New doors only: doors and drawer fronts, soft-close hinges and new hardware, with the boxes left in the finish they have.
• A full reface: the same, plus veneer over every exposed part of the existing boxes to match the new doors.
• Reface and extend: new countertops, extra cabinets or a pantry on top, or an island added or moved.

Two things stay put in every tier. The same page says no plumbing or electrical work is required, and that the current countertops can stay. The sink stays connected and the counter stays fastened down, so nobody opens the walls behind the boxes.

How refacing is done, step by step

1. The installer measures every door, drawer front and exposed box face, and checks each box for square.
2. New doors and drawer fronts go on order at those sizes, in the style and finish you chose.
3. You empty the cabinets, and the old doors, drawer fronts and hinges come off.
4. The installer veneers the face of each box and the end panels you can see.
5. The new doors go up on new hinges, the drawer fronts and pulls go on, and the installer adjusts each hinge until the gaps line up.

Home Depot Canada lists four door styles for the work: Modern Shaker, Slab, Classic Arch and Cathedral. Finishes run from 3D laminates in matte and textured surfaces to high gloss acrylic and five-piece woodgrain. Its page notes that quality wood veneer and high-end hardware raise the cost.

Why refacing suits some Ottawa kitchens and not others

What dates a kitchen is usually the doors, and the doors are what refacing replaces. Our guide on how to pick kitchen cabinets that won't date lists the door styles that have aged worst in Ottawa kitchens over the last 20 years:

• honey oak raised-panel doors with arched tops, dominant from 1995 to 2008
• heavy ornate raised-panel doors in espresso brown, from 2005 to 2014
• glossy thermofoil doors with curved edges in cream or white, from 2008 to 2015
• gloss white slab doors with integrated J-pull handles, from 2015 to 2020

The same guide names shaker and flat slab doors, in a matte paint or a real wood veneer, as the styles that have stayed safe. Two of Home Depot's four refacing styles, Classic Arch and Cathedral, are arched shapes like the first item on that list. Pick the replacement door with that list in mind, or the new doors date the same way the old ones did.

Newer builds with a layout that already works

Our guide to refresh, mid-tier and high-end kitchens puts Barrhaven, Findlay Creek, Kanata and Stittsville homes built between 1998 and 2010 among the houses whose kitchen layouts were already decent. When the sink, the range and the fridge are already where you want them, the kitchen may need new faces rather than a new plan.

That is the kitchen refacing suits, as long as its boxes got through the years since without a leak.

Older houses where the wall is the real question

Most Ottawa kitchens sit in older houses. In the 2021 Census, about 44% of the City of Ottawa's occupied homes were built in 1980 or earlier, and about 60% before 1991. Closed kitchens cluster in the postwar suburbs, and open-concept conversion is the most common renovation request we get in Ottawa.

Refacing cannot help there. A wall that comes out changes where every cabinet goes, and the City of Ottawa lists adding or removing walls among the projects that need a building permit.

How to tell if your cabinet boxes can take new doors

Refacing keeps the boxes, so the decision rests on them. Six checks you can do with a flashlight before anyone comes to measure:

• Empty the sink base and look at the floor of the cabinet. Particle board swells if it ever gets wet, as our cabinet guide puts it. A soft, swollen or peeling base will not take a new door well, and veneer will not hide it.
• Knock on a side panel. Particle board sounds dull, MDF slightly more solid, plywood clean and resonant.
• Look at the hinge screws. Particle board holds a screw once well, twice okay and three times poorly. New hinges need solid material to bite into, so check the old screw holes for crumbling.
• Doors that never close flush, or gaps wider at the top than at the bottom, can mean a racked box. New doors hung on a racked box show the same uneven gaps.
• Pull out the drawers. Refacing replaces the drawer fronts and leaves the drawers behind them unless the quote says otherwise, and our cabinet guide names stapled MDF or particle board drawers on epoxy-coated slides as where cheap cabinets fail first.
• Look inside. Veneer covers the exposed faces, so stained shelves and worn interiors stay as they are.

New doors on boxes that needed replacing is the mistake to avoid. If the sink base and the hinge holes both fail, put the budget into new boxes.

When to replace the cabinets instead

Refacing keeps every box in the same place and at the same size. Any change to where things go, or how big they are, turns it into a cabinet replacement:

• Moving the sink. The City of Ottawa's list of projects that need no building permit includes replacing kitchen cabinets "provided plumbing fixtures remain in same location". Move the sink and it becomes a plumbing alteration that needs a permit, and the base cabinet under it changes anyway.
• A different appliance size. The fridge, range and hood widths set the box sizes around them, so a wider range or a deeper fridge means new boxes on either side.
• A hood that vents outside for the first time. Health Canada's factsheet on cooking and indoor air quality recommends a range hood that fully extends over the burners, and a new duct has to find a route past the upper cabinets. Our kitchen page settles that route before the cabinets are drawn.
• Storage that does not work. Deep shelves stay deep shelves when you reface. In our Stittsville kitchen refresh, new boxes with drawers in place of shelves, and uppers run to the ceiling, raised storage volume by 28 percent. New doors alone could not have done that.

Refacing usually costs less than new cabinets, because the boxes, the countertop and the plumbing stay and there is no tear-out to haul away. Cabinets are usually the largest line in a kitchen budget, as both our cabinet guide and the Stittsville write-up show. How much less refacing costs depends on the door material and how many boxes need veneer, so get both routes priced in writing before you choose.

How long cabinet refacing takes

Home Depot Canada's Ottawa refacing page gives these times to complete:

• new doors and drawer fronts only: 1 to 3 days
• a full reface with veneer on the boxes: 1 to 4 days, or 2 to 4 days for the next tier up
• a full renovation with new cabinets: 3 weeks or more

The FAQ on the same page puts the average refacing job at 3 to 5 days. The doors and drawer fronts are made to your measurements first, so ask how long they take to arrive before you book the install days.

A kitchen that gets new boxes takes longer. Our tier guide gives three to four weeks of work for a same-footprint refresh with new cabinets, and our guide to how long renovations take in Ottawa puts a kitchen at 3 to 14 weeks on site.

In the Stittsville refresh, the kitchen was out of service for 4 of its 5 weeks. With refacing, the sink and the counter stay connected, so you can keep cooking around the work.

Painting, refacing or new cabinets

Short of a full renovation, there are three ways to update kitchen cabinets, and each changes something different:

• Painting keeps the doors and the boxes and changes the colour. Home Depot Canada notes that some cabinets cannot be painted, which limits the options. Our post on why DIY cabinet painting so often looks bad covers the prep it needs.
• Refacing keeps the boxes and changes the doors, the drawer fronts, the hardware and the visible faces.
• New cabinets change everything, including the layout, the storage inside and the size of every box.

Whether refacing beats painting depends on what makes the kitchen look dated. Paint an arched raised panel and you have a differently coloured arched raised panel. If the doors are a plain shaker or slab in good condition, paint may be all they need. If the shape of the door is the problem, refacing fixes it.

Ottawa rules that apply to a refacing job

Building permits

The City of Ottawa lists replacing kitchen cabinets, with the plumbing fixtures in the same location, among projects that need no permit, and refacing changes less than a replacement. The exception is a Heritage District Overlay, where the City gives no exemptions at all, so call before starting. Our guide to building permits in Ottawa covers the application when a kitchen does need one.

Under-cabinet lights

New doors are often when people add lights under the upper cabinets. A plug-in strip is not electrical work. A hardwired light is, and the Electrical Safety Authority says only a Licensed Electrical Contractor, or the homeowner doing their own work, may do electrical work in a home. Our post on ESA electrical permits in Ottawa explains the notification.

The old doors, and a full tear-out

The City of Ottawa's Waste Explorer files kitchen cabinets as construction and demolition waste. That waste is not collected with regular garbage pick-up. It goes to the Trail Waste Facility Landfill or another landfill, and the City says it accepts this material only from residents, not from private contractors.

A full tear-out removes the boxes, the counters and often the backsplash, while refacing sends only the old doors and drawer fronts. Either way, ask your contractor how the waste leaves the site and where it goes.

Older houses and asbestos

Health Canada says that before 1990 asbestos was mainly used to insulate buildings and homes, that it can still be found in older materials such as plaster and floor and ceiling tiles, and that a professional should test for it before you renovate.

Refacing leaves the walls and the floor alone. In a house built before 1990, a tear-out that opens plaster behind the boxes is where the test comes first, as our guide on asbestos in an older Ottawa home explains.

The label on new doors and panels

Since 2023-01-07, Canada's Formaldehyde Emissions from Composite Wood Products Regulations have barred importing or selling particleboard, MDF, hardwood plywood and laminated products that do not meet their requirements. Environment and Climate Change Canada says every composite wood product must be labelled before it is sold, or the seller must keep a copy of the label and show it on request.

Our cabinet guide calls MDF common in painted doors and door panels, and the Stittsville refresh used painted MDF shaker doors. Ask the supplier for the label on the doors and the veneer panels. A bilingual label showing compliance with the United States rule, TSCA Title VI, is accepted in Canada.

What is the downside of cabinet refacing?

Every box keeps its size and position after a reface, so the layout, the storage and any awkward corner stay as they are. Cabinet interiors and drawer boxes usually stay too, unless the quote replaces them.

Refacing also cannot repair damage. A sink base swollen by an old leak, or particle board that no longer holds a hinge screw, needs a new box, whatever goes on the front of it.

Does refacing last?

It lasts as long as the boxes under it. The doors, drawer fronts, hinges and pulls are new on the day they go on, and the boxes are the ones you already had.

Our cabinet guide says plywood holds screws indefinitely and does not swell when wet, so new doors on sound plywood boxes are a long-term fix. New doors on tired particle board get only the life that particle board has left.

Refacing or a full kitchen with Dream Touch

Dream Touch offers both routes from one office, Suite 210 at 33 Roydon Place: cabinet refacing, and custom cabinetry built in-house for a full replacement. Bring what you found in the six checks above to the free design visit, along with the appliances you plan to keep, and ask for both routes.

You get a written, fixed-price quote for the route you choose. For a layout-keep kitchen that got new boxes, read the Stittsville write-up linked above. If the whole room is due, start with our step-by-step guide to planning a kitchen renovation in Ottawa.

Sources

• Home Depot Canada, Kitchen Cabinet Refacing Services in Ottawa, tiers, times to complete and FAQ, read 2026-10-28
• City of Ottawa, Projects not requiring a building permit and Building permit projects
• City of Ottawa, Waste Explorer, Kitchen Cabinets and Construction Material, read 2026-10-28
• Statistics Canada, 2021 Census Profile, City of Ottawa, period of construction
• Health Canada, Cooking and indoor air quality and Asbestos and your health
• Electrical Safety Authority, Who can do electrical work at my property
• Environment and Climate Change Canada, Formaldehyde Emissions from Composite Wood Products Regulations factsheet, read 2026-10-28

Thinking about new doors on your old boxes? Book a free design visit and ask whether refacing or new cabinets suits your kitchen. Get in touch here or call (613) 862-4555, Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Saturday 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Frequently asked questions