# Kitchen cabinet refacing or full replacement in Dubai: cost and when each route works
Refacing swaps doors, drawer fronts, edging and hinges and keeps the old cabinet carcasses in place. Bestimate's 2026 Dubai cost guide prices that around AED 10,000 to 20,000; First Unicorn Interiors' guide prices a full kitchen renovation, new carcasses throughout, from about AED 45,000 up to AED 250,000 for premium imported systems with stone and integrated appliances. Those are market figures, not a DOMECO price list, and refacing only pays off when the boxes behind the doors are dry, square and staying exactly where they are.
The decision gets made with a torch and a screwdriver, not with a mood board. We open the sink base first, because that one cupboard tells us more about the next twenty thousand dirhams than the rest of the kitchen put together.
What kitchen cabinet refacing includes, and what stays old
Refacing in practice means new door and drawer fronts, new edging, new hinges and runners where they are worn, new handles, and usually new end panels and a new plinth so the run reads as one piece. Done properly it also includes re-skinning the visible sides of the carcasses in a matching laminate or veneer, because a new white door against a ten-year-old beige carcass side is the detail everyone notices.
What stays is the structure. The carcass sides and shelves, the base deck under the sink, the back panels, the drawer boxes if they are being kept, the levelling feet, and the holes those hinges screw into. The worktop usually stays as well, along with the splashback behind it, since lifting a worktop off old units tends to break the seal, the tiles or both.
Measurement is less flexible than people expect. Fronts are measured off the existing carcass openings, not off a drawing, so a run that was fitted out of square stays out of square and the new doors are cut to live with it. Hinges use the standard 35mm cup and 32mm system hole spacing, which means the new hinge plates land in the same screw holes the old ones left. If that board has already been opened up and re-screwed once, it will not hold a third time.
When refacing is worth it
The carcasses have to be dry, still holding a screw, and sitting flat; that part cannot be negotiated. The layout also has to work for you as it is, including where the sink, the hob and the extract sit. And budget has to be the genuine priority, not a target you quietly abandon once the selection stage starts.
The clearest case we see is the rental unit. On a one or two bedroom apartment in Marina, JLT or Dubai Hills that goes back on the market every year or two, a refaced kitchen with new handles and a cleaned-up worktop reads as refreshed to a viewing tenant, and the rent does not move far enough to justify a full rebuild. That is a commercial answer rather than a design one, and it is often the honest one. The same logic sits behind the budget refit band in our kitchen renovation cost guide.
Refacing also makes sense when the kitchen was decent joinery to begin with. Solid carcasses in 18mm board with proper backs and adjustable feet are worth keeping even at fifteen years old. Thin flat-pack units with 3mm stapled hardboard backs rarely are, whatever the doors look like.
When only a full replacement is honest
Water ends the conversation. Once the base deck under the sink has swollen, the board has already lost its fixing strength along the front edge and around the pipe cut-out, and no door hung on that cupboard will stay aligned. Swelling is irreversible. Sanding the surface flat and sealing it does not restore what the fibres did when they absorbed water, and anyone promising otherwise has not been back to the flat a year later.
Sagging shelves and crumbling fixings point the same way. The first things to fail in a Dubai kitchen are the short screws holding hinge plates into the carcass side, and the dowels or cam fittings at the bottom corners of drawer boxes. When a hinge plate pulls out under light hand pressure, the carcass has stopped being a structure.
Then there is the layout. Moving the sink, changing the extract route or fitting appliances to different dimensions all mean new carcasses, and in most cases new services, so refacing is not even on the table. The same applies when the old units were built around appliance sizes that no longer exist.
Film-wrapped doors and what happens when you remove them
Many apartment kitchens handed over in Dubai over the last fifteen years use PVC film, often called thermofoil, vacuum-pressed over a routed MDF door. In a kitchen that gets used, the film lifts first at the edge nearest the oven and around the drawer above the dishwasher, where heat and steam meet the glue line. Once it has started to lift, there is no repair, only replacement of the door.
Removing those doors is also where damage shows up. They come off easily enough, but the carcass behind them has had the hinge plates in one position for a decade, and taking them out often brings a plug of board with them. We flag this at survey rather than at invoice stage, because it is the single most common reason a refacing scope turns into a partial replacement halfway through.
What the Dubai climate does to kitchen carcasses
Most kitchen carcasses in the UAE are melamine-faced chipboard or standard MDF. Both are stable in dry air and both fail in the same way once water reaches a cut edge or a drilled hole, which is why the damage clusters in the sink base, behind the dishwasher and along the plinth. Moisture-resistant board, the type often dyed green through the core, holds up considerably better in those positions, but it is a different product at a different price and it is rarely what came with the apartment.
Slow leaks that nobody sees do most of the damage: a loose compression fitting on a waste trap, a weeping angle valve, or silicone that has pulled away where an undermounted sink meets the worktop. Condensation does the rest. Cold water lines in Dubai towers run genuinely cold, and in a closed cupboard with warm humid air around it, a bare pipe sweats and drips onto the deck below for months.
Shutting the apartment up for the summer is the version of this that costs the most. A closed flat in Dubai with the air conditioning switched off entirely will reach high internal humidity, and the places it shows first are joinery edges, drawer bottoms and anything made of board inside a closed cupboard. Leaving the system on a holding setpoint rather than off is cheaper than a kitchen. We have opened units in villas in The Meadows after a long summer absence where the doors still looked fine and the carcasses underneath were gone.
Worth saying clearly: refacing hides this condition behind new doors rather than solving it.
Fronts made to order in the UAE, hinges and lead times
Kitchen cabinet doors can absolutely be made to order in the UAE, and for most projects that is the better route than importing. Joinery workshops across Al Quoz, Ras Al Khor, Dubai Investment Park and the Sharjah industrial areas produce spray-lacquered MDF, acrylic-faced, veneered and laminate fronts to measured sizes, which matters when your carcass openings are not a catalogue dimension.
Finish choice changes how the door ages more than how it looks on day one. Matt lacquer is forgiving with fingerprints and can be repaired locally if it chips. High-gloss acrylic stays glossy and shows every wipe mark. Veneer looks best and reacts most to humidity swings, so it belongs in a kitchen that stays conditioned year round. Edging is a detail worth asking about directly: laser or hot-air applied ABS edging has no visible glue line and holds up far better at the top edge of a drawer front than hot-melt PVC.
For hardware, soft-close hinges and runners from Blum, Hettich or Grass are standard here and are worth specifying by name in the quote. On lead time, local joinery for fronts typically runs two to four weeks from signed sizes, and imported European systems considerably longer. Measure, order, then strip out. Not the other way round.
How each route runs on site
Refacing is the quieter job. A straightforward apartment run means a day of taking off doors and hardware, re-skinning visible carcass faces, hanging new fronts and adjusting them, and usually some silicone and plinth work. Most clients stay in the flat. Water goes off only if taps or the waste are being touched, and only for an hour or two.
Full replacement is a different programme. Strip-out and disposal, services checked and adjusted, new carcasses levelled and fixed, worktop templated after the carcasses are in and then fabricated, appliances connected, tiling and sealing last. The kitchen is out of service for the duration, dust reaches the rest of the apartment unless the doorway is properly sealed, and the stone step adds its own wait between template and installation. Our cost guide covers the realistic windows for each scope.
Building constraints apply to both, with more teeth on the replacement. Towers restrict noisy trades to fixed hours, tighten them during Ramadan, and allocate service lift slots that decide when a worktop can physically arrive. If your unit is still inside the developer's defects liability period, altering services can void cover on the affected work. Management offices in communities like Bluewaters and on the Palm will also want the contractor's trade licence, insurance and a refundable deposit before anyone carries a toolbox in.
One thing people forget on replacement: lifting old units often exposes an unfinished floor strip where the plinth used to be, because the original tiling stopped at the carcass line. That gets found on day two and it is worth agreeing in advance who closes it, which is also where the flooring comparison between marble and porcelain becomes relevant if you are matching an existing floor.
Cost orientation and what a warranty should cover
Market figures first, with the sources named, because these are not our price list. Bestimate's 2026 Dubai guide puts cabinet refacing in the region of AED 10,000 to 20,000, with cosmetic door-and-handle refreshes landing lower than that. First Unicorn Interiors' 2026 guide prices a full kitchen renovation, new carcasses throughout, from around AED 45,000 up to AED 250,000 for premium imported systems with stone and integrated appliances. Treat all of that as planning input. The same brief priced for an apartment in Al Jaddaf and a villa on Palm Jumeirah does not land in the same place, and our own scenario bands for that split sit in the kitchen renovation cost guide. If the worktop needs replacing anyway, run the numbers for both routes before deciding, since the stone is often the biggest single line and the worktop material comparison will move that figure more than the doors do.
Our working rule: once the quote for fronts, hardware and a replacement worktop crosses roughly half the cost of new units, refacing has stopped being the cheaper route in anything but the first year. At that point you are paying most of the price of a new kitchen for carcasses of unknown remaining life.
On warranty, read what the cover actually attaches to. A refacing warranty covers what was supplied and fitted: the fronts, the edging, the hinges, the alignment. It cannot cover a carcass the contractor did not supply, and no honest contractor will pretend otherwise. On a full replacement the whole assembly is ours, which is a different conversation. Our works carry a one year warranty, the scope is fixed in the contract with no additions after the start, and the contract carries a daily penalty if the programme slips on our side.
Before you call a contractor
Fifteen minutes with a torch will tell you most of what you need to know, and it changes what you ask for on the phone.
- Empty the sink base and press the deck with your thumb near the pipe cut-out and along the front edge. Soft, dark or spongy board means replacement.
- Pull out a loaded drawer and look at the bottom corners of the box. Loose dowels, gaps at the joints or a bowed base are structural.
- Check shelf sag at the midpoint of the longest shelves. More than a slight bow under normal load and the board has lost stiffness.
- Close the cupboards, wait a minute, open them and smell. A damp or musty note means moisture is sitting in there now, not historically.
- Hold a door at the handle edge and move it gently up and down. Play at the hinge, rather than at the door itself, means the fixings in the carcass side are going.
If three or more of those come back badly, you are planning a replacement whatever the quote for doors says. If they come back clean and you like your layout, refacing is a sound way to renovate a kitchen without a full replacement.
FAQ
How long do refaced kitchen cabinets last in Dubai?
The fronts and hinges will last as long as any new joinery of the same quality, so the limit is the carcass underneath. On sound, dry melamine or MDF boxes that have never been wet, a refaced kitchen holds up well for years. On boxes that have already taken water or had fixings re-screwed, the doors will start going out of alignment long before the fronts wear out.
Can I reface some cabinets and replace others?
Yes, and it is a common sensible scope. The usual split is a new sink base and the cupboard next to the dishwasher, with everything else refaced, because that is where the water damage concentrates. The condition is colour and finish matching across the run, so the new carcasses need the same front material and edging as the refaced ones, specified from the same supplier.
How long does refacing take compared with a full kitchen replacement?
Once the fronts have arrived, refacing a standard apartment kitchen is typically a few days of site work and you can keep living in the flat. A full replacement keeps the kitchen out of use for weeks rather than days, because it adds strip-out, carcass installation, worktop templating and fabrication, then appliance connection and sealing. The lead time for the fronts themselves is the same in both cases.
Can cabinet doors be made to order in the UAE, or do they have to be imported?
Made to order locally is the normal route and usually the better one, since UAE joinery workshops cut fronts to your measured carcass openings rather than to catalogue sizes. Lacquered MDF, acrylic, veneer and laminate are all produced here, with lead times generally in the two to four week range from confirmed sizes. Imported European fronts and systems are available and take considerably longer.
Does refacing work if the units have been wet?
No. Swollen board has permanently lost its strength and its ability to hold a screw, and refacing puts new doors on a structure that is already failing. Sealing or painting the surface changes how it looks, not what the board can carry. Those cupboards need replacing, even if the rest of the run can be refaced.
What should a refacing or replacement warranty cover?
At minimum the fronts, the edging, the hinges and runners, and the alignment of what was fitted, with a stated period and a named contact. On refacing, ask explicitly what happens if a carcass fails inside the warranty period, and expect a straight answer that old carcasses are not covered. On a full replacement, the whole unit assembly including hardware should sit under one warranty.
If you want a straight answer on which route your kitchen needs, we will open the sink base and two drawers, check the fixings and the deck, and tell you on the spot. Book a site visit and we will scope both options with the numbers side by side.