Jenny Marrs' Clever Cabinet Tip To Refresh Your Kitchen Without A Total Overhaul

HGTV's Jenny Marrs knows a thing or two about refreshing the look of kitchen cabinets, and she can do it without breaking the bank and without forcing a major overhaul of the space. According to Marrs, replacing the doors on the cabinets, instead of the cabinets themselves, is one way for homeowners to save some serious cash on a home reno. Even with all her TV designer street cred, it's an option she'd choose for herself, due to how much money the swap could potentially save.

It'll set you back around $6,369 to completely replace your kitchen's cabinets on average, per Angi, with many home remodelers looking at cabinet replacement costs that range anywhere from $2,000 to $11,000. Those figures reflect the cost of cabinets from the factory. However, if your kitchen is extra large or if you've got your heart set on custom cabinets, you'll likely pay more.

Geographic location also plays a role in how much your cabinet replacement will cost, with jumps in price potentially running into the tens of thousands from one state to the next. For example, the high-end cost to replace cabinets in Oregon can run as much as $42,000, whereas the max cost in Idaho — Oregon's geographic neighbor — is around $18,000. The $4,000 to $5,000 price tag that a cabinet door replacement will cost you seems like a bargain compared to those numbers.

Replacing the cabinet doors in your kitchen starts with taking accurate measurements. If you'd like the doors to have a different overlay than your current cupboard doors do, you'll need to measure the opening of the cabinet doors. As you do, you'll likely notice a bit of "extra" wood on the doors, which extends beyond the edges of the opening. This is the overlay. It's typically bigger than the hole on all sides by about 1/2 inch to 1 1/4 inches. 

You can adjust the amount of overlay, depending on your design goals, clearance needs, and even the kind of materials you're thinking about using for the replacement doors. That said, if you like the way the current doors hang, it's also possible to use one of the cupboards' current doors as a pattern. This home improvement hack is helpful if you're having custom or semi-custom cabinets made. 

On a related note, you also need to consider the possibility of making some changes to the cabinets themselves to fit your new design, particularly if you're building your own cabinet doors. For example, when Jenny Marrs gussied up her own kitchen cabinets, she made room for a coffee station inside one of the cupboards. An addition like this may require you to not only remove shelves inside the cabinet to give the coffeemaker some headroom, but also to cut that door using different dimensions than you used on most of the other cabinets. The goal here is to ensure that everything fits snugly behind the cabinet doors, and more importantly, that the doors can close without obstruction.

For those on an extreme budget, there may not be enough of a cost savings from doing a cabinet door replacement in the kitchen. Five thousand dollars, give or take, is still five grand. However, that doesn't mean that a cupboard reno is out of the question. What it does mean is that you'll have to get clever when the time comes to do your kitchen renovations a la "Fixer to Fabulous." 

One of the simplest ways to give the space a new look is to paint the cupboards a light-and-airy color and then add some new hardware to the doors. For a designer like Jenny Marrs, this might manifest as a cream-colored or neutral-hued paint color on the cabinets that provides a backdrop for pops of color around the kitchen. Both the stove and the fancy cabinet knobs will stand out thanks to the neutral paint color on the cabinet doors. Conversely, if you're a color fiend, you could try painting the cabinets two different colors to provide contrast, and then finish the look with some antique polished brass knobs to create a cool vintage space.

It's also possible to simply dress up the doors. Aside from changing out the hardware, you could pull the doors off the cupboards and do a little carpentry magic to add some metal inlays. Other options include stencils or pieces of wallpaper placed strategically inside the door's molding. Caning, glass, or shutters positioned inside the cabinet doors would also work. Adding extra trim or even beaded board to the fronts of the cabinets offers an additional upgrade for not much money.