A refresh is one of the quickest ways to change a kitchen. New doors and drawer fronts take a few days on site; new worktops add a few weeks of quiet waiting rather than weeks of work in your home.
In Devizes, the kitchen stayed fully working throughout apart from the day the new sink went in, and that is closer to the norm than most people expect.
How long does the door replacement take?
Replacing doors and drawer fronts is the fastest part of a refresh. The doors are made away from your home, so the time you see is the time it takes to remove the old fronts, hang the new ones and align every hinge and drawer runner. For the Devizes kitchen, that was a few days.
Twenty solid oak doors were fitted there. Most were standard sizes, with a few custom-sized by the door supplier to match the existing carcasses. Because the cabinets stay in place, there is no making-good, no first-fix plumbing or electrics and no replastering to wait for.
The same applies to smaller upgrades along the way: one worn drawer and its runners in Devizes were swapped for an upgraded soft-close drawer in the same visit.
How long do new worktops take?
New worktops are the part that stretches the calendar, and it helps to understand why. There are two stages, and neither involves anyone working in your kitchen for long.
Removal to templating takes about 10 working days. The old surfaces come out, and the base units then need time to settle and be checked before the new tops are measured. Any small repairs to the cabinets happen in this window.
Templating to installation takes about 10 working days. Once the tops are measured, the material is cut and finished away from your home, then returned and fitted, usually in a day.
So a door-and-worktop refresh is typically around four to five weeks from start to finish, but only around ten working days of that involves anyone in your home, spread across the project. The gaps between visits are fabrication time, not a constant stream of tradespeople.
How disruptive is a kitchen refresh really?
Far less than a full replacement. On the Devizes project, the kitchen remained fully working throughout the process, apart from the one day when the new undermount sink was installed. Minimal disruption meant not eating from the microwave for weeks on end.
That is the pattern for most refreshes. Because the cabinets stay, the mess is limited to the fronts, surfaces and fittings being changed. Dust sheets and daily tidy-downs keep the rest of the house normal, and meals carry on much as before.
What does a refresh cost?
The Devizes project, with 20 new solid oak doors, new quartz worktops, a new undermount sink, a new mixer tap and an upgraded drawer, came in between £10,000 and £15,000. Prices checked October 2026.
For a fuller picture of where the money goes across a whole project, see my kitchen refurbishment cost guide for Wiltshire. For doors on their own, my guide to the cost of replacement kitchen doors breaks the figures down.
What makes the difference between a calm project and a stressful one?
My one piece of advice: be available for all key decisions. You'll feel more in control, understand all the decisions, why they are needed and their implications.
Refreshes involve fewer decisions than a new kitchen, but the ones that come up matter: the exact worktop edge, the position of the sink, how the new fronts meet an awkward corner. A homeowner who is reachable when those questions surface makes the whole project run to time.
In Devizes, the decision was made early to keep the cabinetry and the layout unchanged, which avoided unnecessary waste and kept the disruption to a minimum.
The full project, photo by photo
The complete story, including what was changed and what was deliberately kept, is in my Devizes case study. If you would like to know whether your kitchen suits a refresh, request a free home visit and I will look at it with you.
If this sounds like your kitchen, request your free Home Design Visit.
