Respray or Replacement Doors? How to Choose

Choose a respray if you like your door style and only want a new colour. Choose replacement doors if you want to change the style itself. Many kitchens are best served by combining the two.

Most people who ring us have already decided they hate their kitchen. What they have not worked out is which part of it they actually hate. Nine times out of ten it turns out to be the colour, and the colour is the cheapest thing in the room to change. I have spent about thirty years in decorating and specialist finishing, nearly twenty five of those running my own business, and the kitchen work grew straight out of that. So when I walk into a kitchen I am looking at what is worth keeping first, not what I can sell you.

Start With the Doors, Not the Colour

Here is the question that settles most of it. Imagine your kitchen exactly as it is now, same doors, same handles, same layout, but in a colour you love. Are you happy? If the answer is yes, you want a respray. If you look at that imaginary kitchen and the shape of the doors still bothers you, no amount of paint is going to fix it and you want new doors.

It sounds simple because it is. The style of a door is its proportions, its edge profile, whether it has a raised centre panel, whether it takes a handle or opens on a routed grip. None of that changes when you spray it. What changes is colour, sheen and condition. Get clear on which of those is upsetting you and the decision more or less makes itself.

• Colour or tired finish is the problem: a respray solves it. See kitchen respraying.
• The door shape itself is the problem: you need replacement doors.
• Worktops are dragging the room down: that is its own job, covered on our worktop refinishing page.
• All of the above: that is very common, and it is where combining the two makes sense.

When a Respray Is the Right Call

A respray is the right call when the kitchen was decent to begin with and has simply gone out of fashion or picked up wear. Cream shakers from fifteen years ago, oak doors that have gone orange, high gloss white that has yellowed near the hob. The carcasses are usually solid, the hinges still work, the layout suits the house. There is nothing wrong with any of it except the look.

The reason a respray gets you a genuinely factory quality finish rather than a painted-on look comes down to how the work is split. Doors and drawer fronts come off and go back to our own workshop, where they are prepared and sprayed in controlled conditions with proper extraction. Fixed frames, end panels and plinths cannot come off, so those are sprayed in your home. That split is the whole trick. The parts that carry the most handling and the most scrutiny get workshop conditions, and the fixed parts get matched to them on site.

The coating is a professional furniture grade product with a specialist crosslinker added, which chemically hardens it rather than just letting it dry. That matters in a kitchen more than anywhere else in the house, because a kitchen door gets cleaned, splashed, steamed and grabbed with wet hands every single day. A hardened finish takes that. A standard trade eggshell does not.

When Replacement Doors Win

Sometimes the style is the thing that has dated. Heavy raised-panel doors with a moulded centre, ornate cornice, cathedral arches, thick timber-look edges. You can spray those a beautiful colour and they will still read as an old kitchen, because the shape is what your eye is picking up on.

Replacement doors are also the answer where the doors themselves have failed. Vinyl wrapped MDF that has started peeling at the edges near the oven or the kettle is the classic one. Once that laminate has lifted, spraying over it is a patch, not a fix. Same with doors that have swollen at the bottom from a slow leak, or veneer that has bubbled.

The upside is that you are not ripping out a kitchen to change its face. Bella doors are made to measure for your existing cabinets, so the carcasses, the layout and the plumbing all stay exactly where they are. There are 36 styles and 127 colours and finishes, which works out at more than two thousand combinations, so there is very little chance of not finding the look you are after. If you want to see how the styles and colours pair up, the door style explorer lets you click through a style and see every colour it comes in.

Combining Both in One Kitchen

This is the option people rarely know exists, and for a lot of kitchens it is the best value in the whole trade. New made to measure doors and drawer fronts go on, and the parts that are not doors, the visible frames, the end panels, the plinths, the cornice, the island sides, get sprayed to match them exactly.

The result reads as one kitchen rather than new doors bolted onto an old frame. That colour match is the bit that goes wrong when doors and painting are handled by two different firms, because you are hoping one company's spray matches another company's factory colour. We do both parts in house, which is why we offer it. It is also why we can be blunt about when it is not needed.

It suits open plan rooms in particular, where you can see the whole run of units and any mismatch between a new door and an old painted panel is sitting there in daylight all day.

Cost, Time and Disruption

Cost is usually where people expect the two options to be miles apart, and they are less far apart than you would think once you compare like for like.

• Kitchen respraying: typically £2,000 to £5,000, depending on the number of doors and drawers, how much fixed frame and panelling there is, and the condition of what we are starting with.
• Replacement doors: typically £2,500 to £8,000, driven by the number of doors, the style and the finish. Supermatt and painted finishes sit differently on price to high gloss and wood effects.
• Worktop refinishing: typically £850 to £4,000, and worth pricing at the same time because worktops and doors are seen together.
• Combining doors and sprayed frames: priced as one job, and cheaper than it sounds because the frame spraying is a smaller slice of work than a full kitchen respray.

On time, most kitchens are completed within five working days. That is the part people are genuinely nervous about, and it is worth being specific. You do not need to empty your cupboards. We only ask you to take out a couple of days' worth of everyday essentials, the mugs, the plates you actually use, the cereal. Cupboard interiors are not sprayed, so everything else can stay where it is.

The kitchen also stays usable each evening. You will have your sink, your cooker and your fridge. Doors are away in the workshop for part of the week so there will be open cupboards for a few days, but you are not living on takeaways and camping in the front room.

Everything we do carries a 2 year workmanship guarantee, and you get written aftercare guidance at the end so you know how to clean it without undoing the finish.

What a Survey Settles

There is one thing neither a respray nor new doors will fix, and that is a kitchen whose carcasses have gone. If the cabinet boxes are chipboard that has swollen from a long term leak under the sink, if shelves are sagging, if the fixings no longer hold in the board, then you are dressing up something structural. In that situation I will say so, because putting a finish worth a few thousand pounds onto boxes that are on their way out helps nobody.

Poor candidates in short:

• Water damaged carcasses: swollen chipboard, soft base panels, anything that has had a sustained leak.
• Failing fixings: doors that have been rehung repeatedly, screws that no longer bite, cabinets pulling away from the wall.
• A layout you already dislike: if you want the sink moved or the island gone, no finish work changes that and you are looking at a new kitchen.
• Heavily damaged laminate on every door: fine for replacement doors, not sensible for a respray.

Everything else is a judgement call, and a judgement call is much easier to make with the kitchen in front of you. Surveys are free and there is no obligation, and you get a written quote after. Most of the time the visit takes under an hour and you finish it knowing exactly which of the three routes you are on and what it costs. That is a better use of an evening than another week of scrolling through photos.

Frequently Asked Questions