We have a total of 46 doors or cabinet doors…that’s a lot of replacing!
I think you should do whatever fits your budget and style.
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We have repainted lots of cabinets and furniture over the years ourselves, but for some reason when we did our current kitchen a few years ago the Chemical washing, sanding, priming and painting did not take… it is a nightmare and now we are in a state of home improvement paralysis because we can not agree on how to fix it. I am ready to rip out the painted hard wood custom cabinets and get cheap ikea ones at this point. 
Very helpful. That’s about what we have, plus the “fake doors” on the sides of cabinets. Did you count that in your number? (We have about 9 of those).
That’s why we are hiring someone…comes with a warranty. Not sure how long….
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I think of course that @thumper1 is right - whatever fits your style and budget is what’s right for you given that you make the best choice you can (type of paint, skill of person doing it) for the job.
We also don’t have a big kitchen BUT they used the space to the max and we have something like 34 doors and 15 drawers. That’s a lot to think about refacing….might make more sense to reconfigure with NEW and less of all!
I have put off redoing our kitchen for so long because of this cabinet dilemma. Now we will sell “as is” and I HOPE to God that in the next home we purchase that the kitchen is quite decent! I don’t want to have to cope with those decisions!
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Yes, this is everything. If you go with MDF the price goes down about $2000.
Our home was built in 1964 and the cabinets are solid wood and in great shape. They were refaced in 1997 by the previous owners and held up extremely well.
We considered painting but I’m treating myself to the kitchen I really want. We’ll be here at least 5 more years and i do think when we do sell we’ll see a good return.
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OP here. The cabinet guy FINALLY got back to me yesterday about prices for new doors.
Remember he said it wouldn’t be much different that the $2,500 I am going to pay for painting? Well, he blames Kraftmaid for taking so long, and the quote was $8,400. WTH? Over three times the price, not including installation, is hardly close!
So, we will be painting our cabinets.
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That was exactly our experience. New doors, refacing or whatever like that was going to be at least three times the cost. We will be painting as well. And we know a bunch of folks who have and we’re very happy.
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We only painted the lower cabinet doors of the kitchen, maybe 10-12 doors at most.
We were lucky, before the pandemic started, back in Feb 2020, we decided to hire somebody to paint the exterior, the guy we found was very good and price was very reasonable. I don’t know if I want to do that today considering all the high prices, but I’m sure that’s one of the tasks my husband won’t do, I don’t let him do anything with tall ladder now, risk of falling is high at this stage.
Just went through my receipts. We paid $20k (including the evil sales tax) to completely reface our kitchen in cherry with new solid core doors to fix the botched paint job of the previous owner. 60-plus doors (based on the number of handles I had to buy at HD) and drawer fronts plus a shallow pantry plus endless sides. The refacers also added soft close hardware and did a fantastic job overall. That was in 2019. A new paint job would have been 2/3 of that amount because it would have required almost complete stripping of the old paint to make sure the new paint would not peel off.
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