When a kitchen starts looking tired, the internet offers you three medicines: paint the doors, wrap them in vinyl, or replace them. Each has a fan club that considers the other two mad. Since we sell one of the three, let us declare that interest now — and then be more even-handed about it than you might expect, because each option genuinely is right for somebody.
Painting your kitchen doors
The cheapest route, and on the right doors it works. Solid timber and matt-finish doors take paint well if — and it is a substantial if — you do the preparation: degrease, sand, prime, two topcoats, and several days of the kitchen smelling of diligence. The result depends entirely on the prep and dries to the standard of the person doing it.
Where painting struggles is the doors most modern kitchens actually have. High-gloss and vinyl-wrapped surfaces are designed to be non-porous, which is excellent news for spaghetti sauce and poor news for primer. Paint sits on them rather than in them, and a chip a year in reveals the old colour underneath like a geological survey. Edges and the area round the handles — the parts hands touch fifty times a day — go first.
Wrapping them in vinyl
Worth splitting into two different things that share a name. Factory wrapping is how many modern kitchen doors, including several of our ranges, are made: a vinyl film pressed over an MDF core under heat and vacuum, bonded across every face and edge in one piece. DIY wrapping is applying self-adhesive vinyl to your existing doors with a squeegee and optimism.
The difference shows at the edges. A factory press wraps the film round the profile in one continuous skin; a hand-applied wrap has to be folded, trimmed and persuaded round every corner, and corners are exactly where steam from the kettle and heat from the oven pick at it. Done carefully it can look sharp for a while, and for a rental refresh it has its place. But when someone says their “wrapped doors” are peeling, it is almost always the hand-applied kind — and it is not repairable, only re-done.
Replacing the doors
The middle road on cost, and the only one of the three that gives you genuinely new surfaces. Your cabinets — which are almost certainly fine — stay put; the doors and drawer fronts, which take all the wear and all the looking-at, are made new to the same sizes. Factory finish, factory edges, new hinge holes, and no afternoon spent squeegeeing air bubbles towards freedom.
Because the doors are made to measure rather than bought in standard sizes, this works whatever kitchen the cabinets came from — will replacement doors fit my existing units? covers the details. Costs are set out honestly, with actual numbers, in how much does it cost to replace kitchen doors? — drawer fronts start from £8.81 and doors from £14.11, which surprises people who have just priced a tin of decent cabinet paint.
The honest decision table
Paint if your doors are solid timber or matt, you enjoy preparation more than most, and the budget is the whole story. Wrap if it is a short-term refresh and you accept the edges are on borrowed time. Replace if you want the kitchen to look new for years rather than months, without paying for a kitchen — because the cabinets you would be throwing away are the part nobody can see.
If that last one sounds like you, start with the measuring guide — sizes are the only thing the whole job depends on — then browse the door ranges. And if you are mid-decision and want a straight answer about your particular doors, send us a photograph; we will tell you honestly if paint is the right call for yours.