When doors alone are the right answer
Replacing doors and drawer fronts changes everything you look at except the face frames. That makes it the right choice in one specific situation: the boxes are sound, the layout works, and the face frames are either in good condition already or are going to be painted along with the new doors.
Where it stops being the right choice is when the frames themselves are the problem. A face frame with a stained finish that cannot be matched, visible damage, or an ambered colour that new doors will not sit against comfortably needs skinning, and skinning is what refacing does. At the other end, if nothing is wrong with the doors except their colour, painting is cheaper and achieves the same thing.
| Route | Doors and fronts | Face frames | Boxes | Layout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Painting | Recoated | Recoated | Kept | Kept |
| New doors and fronts | Replaced | Kept as they are, or painted | Kept | Kept |
| Refacing | Replaced | Skinned in matching veneer or laminate | Kept | Kept |
| Replacement | New | New | New | Can change |
Scope comparison. The choice between the middle two comes down entirely to the condition and colour of the existing face frames.
Measuring: the opening, never the old door
Every door is sized from its opening plus the overlay on each edge. That means the opening is the governing dimension and the old door is not, which matters because old doors carry forward every error that has ever been made in a kitchen: doors trimmed on site by a previous installer, doors swapped between openings during a repaint, doors from a replacement cabinet that never quite matched.
In a kitchen of twenty openings it is entirely normal to find three or four that differ from their neighbours by an eighth of an inch or more, particularly in an older Mobile house where the face frames have moved with the structure. Making every door to its own opening is the difference between a run of even reveals and a run where two doors look slightly wrong and nobody can say why.
Overlay, the decision you probably do not get to make
Overlay describes how much of the face frame the door covers, and on a doors-only job it is largely fixed by the openings you already have.
Full overlay
The door covers almost the entire face frame, leaving a narrow and even reveal between adjacent doors. It reads as contemporary, it maximises the apparent door size, and it demands accurate hinge setting because there is very little margin between doors.
Partial overlay
The door covers part of the frame and a band of frame stays visible between doors. Traditionally these doors have a lipped or rabbeted edge that sits into the opening. This is the most forgiving overlay to fit, which is exactly why it was standard for decades, and it is what most kitchens built before about 2000 in this market actually have.
Inset
The door sits flush inside the opening with an even reveal all round. It looks the best of the three and costs the most, and HomeAdvisor prices inset at roughly a 20 percent markup over comparable traditional styles. On a doors-only job, converting an existing kitchen to inset is usually not viable, because inset needs consistently square openings and an older face frame rarely provides them.
Door styles, and which survive this climate
There are six practical door styles and they divide into two groups for the purposes of a humid coastal kitchen: those with a floating centre panel and those without.
| Style | Construction | Seasonal behaviour here |
|---|---|---|
| Slab | Single flat face, MDF or veneered panel | No panel joint, so nothing opens up. The most stable choice |
| Shaker | Flat panel in a square-edged five-piece frame | A hairline can appear at the panel shoulder in winter, visible when painted |
| Recessed panel | Flat panel, profiled inner frame edges | As shaker, with the profile making the line slightly less obvious |
| Raised panel | Shaped centre panel in a five-piece frame | Most movement, most visible when painted, best hidden by stain |
| Mullion or glass | Glazed panel behind a grid | Glass does not move; the frame does. Stable in practice |
| Louvre | Angled slats in a frame | Ventilates well, which is genuinely useful on a pantry or a laundry cupboard here |
Movement behaviour follows from the floating panel, which is designed to move. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory recommends 11 percent in-service moisture content for interior woodwork in the damp warm coastal area against 8 percent nationally, so the seasonal swing around it is larger here.
The door styles guide goes through each one in detail, including which ones are actually cleanable and how the overlay decision interacts with the style decision.
Matching an existing kitchen, honestly
On an extension or a partial replacement, the question is whether new doors can be matched to old ones. The profile can be matched exactly by measuring the existing door's stile width, rail width, panel reveal and edge profile. The species can be matched. The stain formula can be matched on the bench.
What cannot be matched on day one is age. Wood ambers with light exposure, and oak and cherry do it faster than most. A twenty year old door in a bright Mobile kitchen has drifted well away from its original colour, and a new door finished to the original formula will read noticeably fresher. The honest options are to accept a difference that narrows over a year or two, to replace all the doors together, or to refinish old and new as one set so they start from the same point.
While the fronts are off
A doors and fronts job opens up every drawer box in the kitchen, which makes it the cheapest moment to deal with the boxes themselves. Stapled butt-jointed drawer boxes on side-mount epoxy slides are what fails first in a busy kitchen, always in the same place: the deep drawer under the cooktop that holds the heavy pans. Replacing those boxes with dovetailed ones on full extension undermount slides costs far less when the fronts are already off.
- Replace stapled drawer boxes with dovetailed or doweled boxes while the fronts are off.
- Move from side-mount epoxy slides to full extension undermount slides, which also gains you the back of the drawer.
- Fit soft close, which is a hardware specification and has nothing to do with the door style.
- Add roll-out shelves in deep base cabinets at the same time, since the boxes are accessible.
- Replace shelf pins and drill for adjustable shelving where the shelves were fixed.
- Change the hardware, because the doors are off and the holes are being drilled anyway.
The hardware page covers hinges, slides and pulls, and the fittings guide covers the interiors.
What replacement doors cost
No publisher produces a reliable separate national figure for replacement doors alone, and we are not going to invent one. The position in the range is clear enough: doors-only sits below refacing, because the face frames are not being skinned, and above painting, because material is being replaced rather than recoated. Thumbtack's national average for cabinet painting is $1,200 to $7,000 as of 8 July 2026, which gives you the floor.
For the ceiling, full replacement at HomeAdvisor's national installed range is $500 to $1,200 per linear foot for custom work, updated 17 June 2026. A doors-only job is a small fraction of that, and the variables that move it are the number of openings, the door style and whether the finish is paint or stain. The cost guide carries every published figure with its source and date.
Doors and fronts across Mobile County and the Eastern Shore
Kitchens from the 1980s and 1990s across Saraland, Daphne and Spanish Fort are the most common candidates, because the face frames in that era are usually solid oak and in good condition while the doors have dated. Older kitchens in Mobile and Fairhope more often need the frames dealt with too, which points toward refacing.
Full service area, and measured quotes start on the contact page.