Kitchens are like cars, they can make a statement about your personality, you use them everyday and eventually, after years of wear and tear and changes to modern living, they will need replacing.  

Often times when a family is in need of a new kitchen, but do not think they can afford one yet, they consider painting their kitchen cabinets and purchasing new worktops. This can be an excellent way to keep with recent trends if your  kitchen is in good working order and the layout of your kitchen maximises space and how the modern family lives. There are a couple of cons though that need to be considered before you invest in repainting or replacing doors, you may be surprised at some of the hidden costs and just how much work it is to repaint a kitchen.

Problems can include getting a finish that lasts. Generally a DIY painted kitchen wears incredibly quickly. When you are painting on top of an already used cabinet, you need to spend a lot of time cleaning, sanding and then sanding and cleaning again, all before the first layer of your new paint colour goes down. The entire process is very labour intensive. Even if your cabinets appears clean, there will be layers of grease accumulated that has built up over time. It is very difficult to actually remove all of these layers to a professional looking standard. This becomes even more difficult if your kitchen cabinet has beading.

Repainting a kitchen can provide a short term cosmetic update, like repainting a car. But it is not fixing the real issue, this may be the layout of the kitchen, your doors have dropped and no longer line up next to each other, worktops scratch and dent, or the carcass to the cabinet has blown.

The main reason people chose to replace a kitchen instead of repainting the doors is to meet the needs of modern family day living, like including breakfast bars and islands with seating areas for a more sociable kitchen, redesign to include more worktop space or to fit in appliances, deeper drawers for ease of use, and  magic corners for better use of space. Most kitchen companies offer a free measure and design service so before investing in repainting your doors, it is worth getting a quote on what the cost of a new kitchen would be.