The question is almost never about age. It is about what the boxes are made of and whether the doors still hang true — and you can check both yourself in about ten minutes.
People usually ask about their cabinets the wrong way round. They start from how old the kitchen is, or how dated the colour looks, and neither of those decides anything. A thirty-year-old solid maple cabinet can refinish beautifully. A twelve-year-old particleboard one with a swollen sink base often cannot. Age is not the variable — substrate and structure are.
Start with what the boxes are made of. Open a door and look at the raw edge of the cabinet side, or pull a drawer right out and look at the back of the face frame. Solid wood and good plywood both refinish well: they take stain, they sand back cleanly, and they hold a screw. Particleboard and MDF are a different question — they are perfectly fine while they are sealed, but once water has got in and swollen an edge, that swelling does not sand out. It is a permanent change to the material.
Then check the sink base specifically. It is where cabinets die, because a slow supply-line drip runs for months before anyone notices. Press the bottom panel with your thumb. If it is firm, good. If it gives, flakes, or shows a dark tide line up the back, that one cabinet may need replacing even if every other box in the room is sound — which is a repair, not a new kitchen.
Next, the doors. Open one to about forty-five degrees and let go. It should stay put. Look at where the hinge screws land: if the holes are chewed out and the door sags, that is usually fixable — the screw hole gets plugged and re-drilled. Look at the door faces too. On a solid wood door, a split along a panel joint can be worked with. On a veneered door, veneer that has bubbled or lifted at a corner is much harder, because there is nothing solid under it to sand into.
Finally, be honest about the layout. Refinishing changes colour and finish. It does not move a wall, add a drawer bank, or fix a kitchen where the dishwasher door hits the island. If the layout is genuinely wrong for how you cook, a beautiful finish on the wrong cabinets is still the wrong kitchen, and that is worth knowing before any work starts rather than after.
If the boxes are sound, the doors hang true and the layout works, refinishing is usually the better call — it keeps solid carcasses out of a skip and lets you change the colour completely. If the sink base has gone soft and the doors are delaminating, no finish will fix that, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a coat of paint over a problem.
Not sure which side of that line your kitchen falls on? Call (818) 853-1876 and we will come and look at the actual cabinets. Photos help, but the thumb test on a sink base is something that has to be done in person.
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