Hi all,

First time poster, long time reader here. My Husband and I recently moved to a new home with plans to renovate the kitchen. We live in a backsplit style home built about 26 yrs ago. The kitchen cabinets we have are original to the home and are oak with a raised panel. They are in perfectly good condition.

We plan to take down the wall between the kitchen and dining room and replace it with a breakfast bar (so I suppose we're only partially removing the wall to breakfast bar height). We plan to move some cabnitry around so we can move the range and add some new pieces to make up for lost cabinet space (the uppers).

My hope (and this is where I'm looking for advise as to whether it is realistic or not :) is to paint the cabinets (cloud white probably) and use white subway tiles. However, we've met with a couple of kitchen cabinet places and we're mostly being told that we'd be better off to remove the current cabinets and go with a white thermofoil (or new wood cabs).

My problem with this is that the cabs are in really good condition and I'd hate to just get rid of them altogether. Husband is handy and we've had friends successfully paint oak cabinets so that part isn't a big concern. I am concerned though that we'll not be able to properly match up new cabinets to the old ones. We're not looking for perfection, but something fairly close.

I'm wondering if any of you have had similar experience? Has anyone successfully painted their oak cabinets and added new pieces? Any thoughts that might help with our decision making?

Thanks in advance!