the_sean•11d agoMost Upvoted

The debate over painting kitchen cabinets vs replacing them came to a head for me last month

I was at Home Depot in Austin and this older guy stopped me as I was looking at cabinet doors. He said "just paint what you got, it'll save you $3,000 easy." Then the store associate walked over and said "replace them, paint never lasts on old cabinets." They started arguing right there in the aisle about which method holds up better. Has anyone else had two strangers give totally opposite advice on a project like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

eva_moore11d ago

Funny enough, my partner and I had a similar showdown at Lowe's last year over the same thing. I was ready to just paint our beat-up oak cabinets and an employee said it would peel in six months, but then a lady shopping nearby yelled over, "I painted mine three years ago and they still look great!" We ended up painting them and they're already chipping around the handles, so maybe I should have listened to the skeptic. Guess my cabinets and I are both aging about as gracefully as expected.

bailey.jennifer10d ago

Honestly your handles are where the paint is gonna fail every time. The real question is does it really matter that much if cabinets chip a little after a couple years? People act like peeling paint is a crisis but you can just touch it up in five minutes @eva_moore.

torres.blair10d ago

Painting cabinets is a half measure that always looks worse than just living with the wood. Those chips around the handles you're seeing now are only the beginning in six months you'll have bare spots all over the door fronts where your hands grab them. Touch up paint never matches exactly either so you end up with a patch job that's more obvious than the original damage. The employee at Lowe's was dead right but people don't want to hear the boring truth when a stranger validates their shortcut. Stripping and restaining those oak cabinets would have cost more time upfront but you'd be done worrying for the next ten years. Sometimes the hard way is actually the easy way in the long run.