Don't try to get them to match - it's way too hard. Paint them in colors that go nicely together, but making the base cabinets one color and the uppers (the originals) another would be easier and more interesting.

Well, it would not be all uppers one color and all lowers another. It would be one entire wall of cabinets one color, one another, and the third wall mixed. I don't think it would be possible to have that look intentional. Plus it's a small kitchen, I think that might be a bit busy.

Why is it impossible to have them match? If I have new custom doors made and all of them painted at the same time, why wouldn't they match? Surely the color would. And the style would be very close if not perfect?

You could take a door painted the current color to the paint store and have it matched. The problem is if you know if the paint is oil or water based. If oil, it will gradually yellow, ever so slightly with the newer paints, making it nearly impossible to match. I think that's why the previous poster said it's too hard to do.

This also might be your opportunity to repaint the kitchen to a color you truly want. Or, just try to match. I do recommend Benjamin Moore Satin Impervo paints as they hold up really well in my kitchen (painted last year). Plus the folks at the BM paint stores are generally very knowledgeable with any questions you may have.

I think we are talking past each other? I am talking about having all the existing cabinets repainted at the same time as having the new ones done. That's why I mentioned having both the new and the old doors professionally spray painted at the same time, in my original post. So they would match then, right? I can't imagine why they would not.

We will definitely have budget constraints, but my motivation in keeping some of the old cabinets is not to save money--I suspect it would be cheaper to gut it all and replace with IKEA top to bottom. I am playing with this idea to preserve some of the orginal kitchen. So, repainting the existing cabinets along with painting the new is absolutely under consideration. But I would want to do it in a way that makes for the longest lasting possible paint finish. I am worried about the durability of a non-factory paint finish.

DUH! I misread.

If it's full overlay and you take all the doors to be sprayed ... all it takes is good prep (maybe stripping the old ones) and a decent painter. They can use catalyzed laquers and things that a homeowner can't use.

If you really want them to match, reusing the doors from your original cabs would be more effective than having new doors made. There's something about eased edges and old wood that can't really be copied well... If you were thinking of switching from doors to drawers on those new base cabs, you'll have no choice, but this might be the one instance in which it would be a better choice to use roll outs that sit behind your original doors. It's early yet - you have plenty of time to think about it, learn to post images, browse houzz, and maybe even find a way to reuse that ice box door.

{{gwi:1562640}}

Thanks!

One of my main goals would be to increase drawer space. So, I don't think reusing old doors would work out. Plus, I would be putting in a corner cabinet and there are currently none. So there isn't a door that would be that size. And I might be taking out a small pantry and replacing it with just lower cabinets. Not sure on that one. Also, oddly (or maybe not) the doors under the sink are slab, even though every other door in the kitchen is shaker. . . . .

This sounds like our kitchen when we started! By the time we were done, we only kept one original cabinet, but we did match half of the new cabinets to it. Our original cabinets had been rebuilt in the 1930s with slab overlay doors, but other built-ins in the house with the Shaker doors remained, so we matched the door style to that--and were super lucky to "find" the original door to the one cabinet we kept (a California cooler cabinet) buried under a slab of plywood that had been nailed on to make it match the 1930s cabinets.

Here are some lessons learned (we finished in October 2011; only back floating around here now because we're finally trying to design our island at long last).

- If you have shallow cabinets, common in houses of that era, think carefully about where it makes sense to keep them and where it doesn't. They don't play nicely with a lot of modern appliances (especially dishwashers)

- If you have young kids you may want to check for lead paint (our old cabinets were painted in enamel that contained a lot of lead)

- We did match the color on the one original cabinet to one wall of new cabinets, and it's been fine; they were all painted at once with the same paint. The new cabinets were sprayed by our cabinetmaker; we (carefully!) sanded and painted the original door ourselves with brushes. We did a different color but the same style door (Shaker) for the other two walls of cabinets because we used frameless cabinets there for space reasons, so that gives them a different look that (I think, at least!) works for meshing new and old. Some friends who recently remodeled their 1940s kitchen combined IKEA with the original cabinets and also got a look that works by not trying to match them, but letting them be different and complementary.

- If you are replacing the boxes, trying to reuse the doors will probably make you crazy. It's possible, but requires some excellent/exacting carpentry skills. I spent a while trying to figure it out and it just isn't worth it unless you have very special doors to preserve/reuse (ours were plywood, built by a previous owner). You also need a cabinetmaker/carpenter who is willing to work with you on that, which can be challenging to find. We also found out during demo that the construction on our cabinets was not stellar, so in retrospect I'm really glad we didn't spend a lot of time trying to save or reuse them. However, ours also weren't original to the house, so you might have better luck.

It is definitely more work to preserve some elements than to gut it all--when we were interviewing GCs, several though I was nuts--but I'm soooo glad we did it! However, I'm also sooo glad we have a dishwasher and functional drawers now--so keep the end goal in mind too. :) Good luck!

Thank you so much for the been there, done that, advice!

The lead paint thing is very important as we do have kids. I had thought of that and wondered if off-site prep and painting of the old doors might be best.

I was looking at the drawers in the existing cabinets this morning and they are nailed, not dovetailed. Wonder if they really are orginal? Certainly the ice box must be, if not original, close to it in age, but perhaps the rest of that run of cabinets was added at a later time?

I think that the idea of keeping the uppers and replacing the lowers is workable. I wouldn't try to "match" anything though. Let the history of the home be told through the story of the cabinets by doing the bases in a different color deliberately than the uppers. They could even be a completely different door style. There is so much that will make you truly crazy about trying to "match" things, that it's much better to just not even try unless you're a purist with a lot of money and time to spend.

Our drawers are/were all nailed too--I think it was common, at least in California, for less expensive bungalows. I'm 99% sure our original cabinets were slab overlay drawers (which they kept in the 30s remodel) with Shaker inset doors (which they replaced in the 30s when they reconfigured the cabinets; drawers were reused). Our drawers were all made of nailed redwood and Douglas fir (and painted from the beginning according to the house plans, although the lowest layer of paint w minty green!)

They sound like they could definitely be original to me, but I don't know what the norms would have been where you are at that time--could be fun for you to research!

Thanks! Good to know that this construction might be typical. Random people keep saying that we shouldn't replace the cabinets because they must be better built than anything new we would buy. I'm not convinced on that point, given the nailed drawers and, of course, the old hardware isn't nearly as good as modern hardware. I think the reason to keep any of it would just be preservation/charm. This is an old house, but not of any particular historic value so while I like the idea of preserving original features, I don't feel like we absolutely have to if it is prohibitively expensive or not functional.

There is no way to keep the uppers and replace just the lowers. One wall is a built in Hoosier and beside it is shallow floor to ceiling cabinets with no counter. That's the wall I think we might be able to leave intact.

Then we might be able to keep the cabinet above the refrigerator. All the lower cabinets in the sink run would need to be replaced because I would need to incorporate a corner cabinet there and get a dishwasher in as well.

I am having a very hard time seeing two different cabinet styles working well when they would be so jumbled. I have seen different styles done successfully where they were all lowers one way and all uppers another, or where the island is different or where one wall is done as a built-in hutch. But I have never seen a kitchen where just some of the lower cabinets are a different style.

Would it really be that hard to have custom doors done?

I'll hunt up the link to our reveal, since that's similar to what we did. I suspect it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love it. In our case the mismatched cabs are mostly new, but it's modeled after our neighbor's kitchen, where the mismatched ones are original. For us, it was partly compromise--I wanted white framed inset but DH wanted modern frameless--and partly logistics; in a small drawer-heavy kitchen, we lost too much space with all inset.

Ours works for me largely because the look is consistent if not identical; it's not random (or at least doesn't seem that way to me, though others might disagree!) We used the same door styles throughout, but just mixed up colors and counters. The framed white cabinets have a wood counter, match the look of other built-ins in the house, and are visible from other rooms. The frameless grey cabinets have soapstone counters and can't be seen unless you're in the kitchen. Our neighbor has the same setup except with new stained cabinets instead of painted.

It's not authentic or historic, but it's also not jarring in an old house--and most importantly, it's functional for a 21st century family.

Custom doors aren't too bad if they're overlay; more work for inset and a nightmare for partial inset. If it works with your layout, though, I might try to preserve the Hoosier wall in its entirety and scrap the rest; you may find that trying to keep the fridge cabinet constrains you too much.

The only reason I am thinking of keeping the fridge cabinet is that I think the refrigerator may stay in the same spot and we just bought a new refrigerator that fits nicely.

My house was built in 1900. The kitchen was remodeled sometime after that, with cabinets that were built in place, not stock cabinets, so maybe in the 1930s? Then, fairly recently, someone built a large islandish sort of thing in the space where the original coal stove used to be.

The old cabinets, most of them at least, got new doors from the big box store. The doors and drawers that couldn't be replaced with new fronts because of their size and the framework of the old cabinets all got painted with a color-matched paint.

The kitchen looks like the cabinets are all the same. It's not until you start opening doors that you realize that some are different from the others.

All that to say that yes, if you paint everything the same color, it will look very much the same.

The kitchen really needs a gut remodel at this point, but a new furnace and roof come first!

Thanks for letting me know you were successful in matching the old and new!

Our photos are in the link below. I will say that we are now struggling with what to do about our freestanding island/work table, though--which cabinets to match? Neither? Much easier if your perimeter cabinets are all the same! (Originally we had decided on a stainless steel shelf with butcher block to match our wood counter, but then we realized that open shelves are not remotely toddler-proof, and IKEA discontinued both the table and the counter. So now we're back to square one...)

Here is a link that might be useful: Kitchen with new mismatched cabinets

Artemis78, thank you for the lovely visual! How do you like your soapstone? That's high on my list for possible countertops. And were you happy with your fabricators?

Thanks!

whenever someone wants to match old cabinets to add a few new ones, I always point them at Young's Fine Furniture. They are an unfinished cabinet maker that is very very reasonable in price with shortish lead times, inexpensive to customize, and their styles match a lot of the old timey styles you find in old houses. They are unfinished on the exterior but clear coated on the interior (which is the hard part to finish anyway) and they are really well built, really nice quality (have heard nothing but positives from the contractors who have used them) and did I mention pretty inexpensive? Plywood boxes, good hardware - the only thing to watch is that their standard is slab drawers and a 5-part drawer face is an upgrade.

Here is a link that might be useful: young cabinetry

Thank you for the link!

For another perspective, we just updated a 1931 kitchen. Most of the cabinets doors were original shaker. At some point, the original doors under the sink were replaced with flat plywood. We kept the existing cabinets and added more with a mix of flat and shaker doors.

Our carpenter shortened existing doors over the refrigerator and from the old ironing board cabinet. He made new ones for the water filter cabinet and dishwasher panel. So, I say mixing it up is ok.

Here is a link to the reveal.

Here is a link that might be useful: kitchen reveal

@ljwrar, I missed your reveal since I haven't been around in a while--love it, and especially your idea for the ironing board cabinet reuse; ours is still sitting in our basement since there was no wall space left for it and we couldn't figure out what to do with it, but I really like that as an option. I also love the tile counter--I still wonder if ours had tile before the previous owner slapped on cheap granite to sell it a few years back. (We looked into doing a new tile counter in that style, but it was way too expensive, sadly.) And yay Bay Area! :)

For crl, our soapstone is actually the one element of our kitchen that I'm not happy with. We would not do the specific stone we have again. However, we ended up with a very soft soapstone because it was the only non-green soapstone at our price point; in retrospect we should have gone with solid surface or shifted budget from something else to get a harder (or green!) stone. We went in with eyes wide open and were fine with patina, but our stone is so soft that we cannot place bottles with ridges (e.g., olive oil or beer) on it without getting a permanent imprint, and I can't wear a belt when I work at the sink or it takes chunks out of the stone edge. (I understand that our particular batch/quarry is even softer than some other versions with this name, so it may also just have been bad timing). We also get a lot of minor pitting in our stone, which is apparently par for the course for softer stones and is easily hidden visually with a good oiling, but frustrates me nonetheless. I don't consider this all a strike against soapstone overall--I still love the look and we like it a lot for the main features we got it for, its ability to handle heat and water and provide a great surface for dough, but it was not the right fit for us. I would either choose a harder soapstone or (more likely) pay the extra to do Caesarstone or Paperstone, if we had it to do again--but at the time, it was near the end of our remodel full of surprises and we were very budget constrained. C'est la vie! Advice: get samples and test, test, test.

Our fabricators were fine but not amazing. They cracked the stone on installation, but after some emergency GW consulting, we let them go ahead and epoxy it instead of replacing it, and that has actually been fine--not noticeable to anyone other than us. They did not match the veins in the seam well, which irked us for a while, but it doesn't bother me at this stage. So I would neither avoid nor recommend them, I guess.

I do adore our wood counter, though, which is IKEA butcher block finished with Waterlox. (Sadly they've discontinued the size; it was what we planned to use on our freestanding island, too.)

Coming in late to the conversation here. My first question for you is what is the quality of the cabinets you have in your kitchen? Living in a neighborhood of older houses (mine is 1916), I have seen a wide range of quality of these cabinets; just like today some were high quality and some were low. If they tuly are good quality--thick solid construction with a lovely appearance, do not worry about the nailed drawers. My house has beautiful built-ins made of quarter sawn oak, and the drawers are nailed not dovetailed.

Nearly twenty years ago we salvaged an entire kitchen of cabinets from a kitchen remodel. They are birch with inset panel doors, sort of a Shaker style with the recessed panels but with a little bit of detail on them rather than just the plain Shaker inset. When I bought them we saw them uninstalled in a house where the electricity was not on. I thought they were a natural finish, but it turned out they were painted in a kind of golden color. I stripped all of them, and we stained them so the wood is exposed. We designed out kitchen remodel around these cabinets AND we hired a carpenter to make matching new cabinets. The kitchen turned out beautifully, and today with these cabinets it is still as nice and appropriate to our house as it was when we did it. I am only lurking around here because it is time to change out the range an countertops. Even though the kitchen remodel was a budget job, and we did much of the work ourselves, it was so worth it (and in perspective not all that expensive) to pay an expert to create matching rather than to just try to put in something somewhat close from Ikea or someplace else. A neighborhood friend did that, and it wasn't particularly appealing.

I appreciate all the input on this. I am no expert, but the built-in Hoosier and the shallow cabinets next to it seem to be well made to me. The drawers in the Hoosier are quite difficult to open and close though. Perhaps a good carpenter could find a way to add runners so they would open and close better?

I think the lower run with the ice box and sink are not as well made. I don't know if they were done at different times or by different people? The sink cabinet doors are slab and don't fit together perfectly. Maybe they were replaced at some point? And the drawers on that run are very small--smaller than necessary so that there is a lot of face frame showing and a lot of wasted space, even for face frame construction. At any rate, I think this run would have to be replaced in its entirety to make any real improvement in the function of this kitchen.

I suspect in the end it will come down to budget. We are too far out to get bids, but I strongly suspect it will be more expensive to try to retain some of the original kitchen. So we will see how long I can last with no dishwasher (and two small children) and no counter space next to the range and refrigerator)--the longer I last the bigger the budget.

Artemis, I am sorry to hear about your soapstone. It is currently my leading contender for the countertop, as I refuse to bow to the authentic tile countertop for this kitchen. We are also seriously considering soapstone for our master bath counter top, which will come before the kitchen.

Thanks again!

I put in the more authentic-look tile with contrasting bullnose edging nearly twenty years ago. I still like the look and the color I chose, and it was a very good budget choice (we were severely trying to save every penny at that time) because I installed it myself. And, it has held up this long. But, now it will be replaced because it has chipped in several places where we have dropped heavy things on it.

I do have to say though that from a longevity, looks and monetary aspect it was a good choice. I think it will be replaced by soapstone this time around.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear from my earlier post, I don't think you should discount soapstone at all--I would use it again in the right setting. I just wouldn't use *our* particular soapstone. We didn't get samples and test, and we should have (it was at the top of our budget so we just went with the cheapest stone they had--mistake!) I remember someone here, Marcolo I think, getting samples a few months after ours went in and commenting that our stone looked like Ray Liotta after the testing. ;) But I do still love it for the reasons we chose it, so I would look for a harder soapstone that had those great qualities with fewer of the downsides. All soapstone will show some wear, but usually it's more like a patina, and many can be oiled or sanded to hide this if you want. I don't think most people have the issue with the edges gouging and breaking down like we do.

A few random thoughts, too--our sink cabinet was much the same as yours. In our before pics you can see one door completely missing--it wouldn't close so we finally just took it off! Our sink run had been built in a later remodel (using, we think, parts of the original cabinets) because the original sinks of that era were freestanding behemoths (beautiful, but rarely kept in remodels in the 30s-50s sadly) so it was common for those cabinets to be remodeled even if others were kept. Ours were very poor condition (only mediocre quality to start, and many years old with water leaks and such to boot) and could not be salvaged. They were also three-sided built-in-place (very common in that era) which limited how easily we could reuse or adapt them.

And I love love love tile counters, but we got it priced out and it was well above the cost of any stone options to have it done well (critical for it to be level--while we were fine doing our backsplash ourselves, we were not confident in our ability to get a perfectly level surface on the counter) using epoxy grout (which local places said was the solution to icky grout, something we wanted to avoid--dunno what the thinking on this is these days, as this was three years ago). If you have strong DIY tile skills, maybe an option, but otherwise, it's probably not worth the cost.

And last (sorry for the length!) two thoughts on drawers: yes, they can add runners if you want (may need to replace the boxes though depending on drawers), but beeswax did wonders for ours! Try that first for sure. We did find that it was less costly to remodel the areas where we did not open walls beyond electrical, so I think if you can divide the kitchen by walls, it would be feasible to keep the Hoosier and drawers but gut the other areas. However, we also had and were keeping plaster walls--drywall is a lot cheaper so then it might make more sense to go down to the studs and just put up new wall. It may also affect code requirements, too. Where we did not open walls, our existing wiring was grandfathered in (except for counters, since cabinets/counters were new). That did save us some money too.

I really appreciate all the feedback and tips!