Kitchen cabinets on my first one: paint the old boxes or replace with stock units

Before you decide, read your purchase contract for anything about the seller removing appliances or fixtures, because a missing range in a kitchen you just painted turns into a 900 dollar line item you didn't budget. I've seen that clause buried in an addendum twice.

On your actual question, the thing that moves the needle is the price band. Under about 250 in most affordable markets, sprayed oak with good hardware sells fine because buyers there are comparing you to houses with no work done at all. Above that you start competing with other renovated inventory and the grain shows. Photograph both versions in your head at the price you plan to list.

I've done four with paint and one with stock replacement. The paint jobs all sold. The stock replacement sold too and I made less money on it.

What I'd push back on is the timeline claim. Spraying in place is not automatically faster. If your painter has to mask the whole kitchen, pull doors, spray them somewhere with airflow, and let them cure before rehang, you can lose ten days easy and you cannot use the room during any of it. Stock cabinets arrive in boxes and go up in two days if the walls are straight. Ask both quotes for a day count in writing and see if the 6,000 saving is really costing you nothing.

The question I was too embarrassed to ask for a long time is whether appraisers actually score cabinets separately. From what I've been told they don't, they pick comparable sales and adjust for overall condition, so a painted kitchen and a new kitchen can both land in the same condition bucket. Which would mean the 6,000 buys you nothing on the appraisal and only maybe buys you buyer feeling.

Rigging, has your agent actually pulled the closed sales of both kinds in that neighborhood, or is the photos comment just a general impression? That's the one piece of evidence that would settle it.

Reading this while trying to figure out if flipping is even my strategy, and this thread is a decent argument that it is harder than it looks. Six thousand dollars sits inside a decision nobody in the thread agrees on.

Scope creep starts exactly here. You replace the cabinets, then the new boxes are a different depth so the counter template changes, then the backsplash tile you already bought doesn't reach, then the floor transition at the toe kick is wrong and someone is cutting LVP in your driveway on day nineteen.

Spraying keeps the geometry fixed, and fixed geometry is the whole reason a cosmetic flip stays cosmetic. Still, quarry is right about the cure time, and I'd add that spraying oak without grain filler gives you a surface that looks like painted oak from three feet. If you want the paint to read as new, the filler and sanding is real labor and your 3,800 probably doesn't include it. Ask what prep is in the number.