I wouldn’t. I’ve been down this road, and in the end ive ripped it all out and putting in an IKEA kitchen. Your cabinets are over 30 years old. They’ve done their job. I highly doubt they have a fraction of the functionality that today’s cabinets do. And if you go with IKEA it will likely be cheaper just to tear it all down and put in exactly what you want.

Of course it's possible, but will you be happy? I did it in my kitchen and I'm happy. The PO had built the cabinets using plywood and rock maple, but almost all base cabs had a single drawer and door below. They were very sturdy but he'd made wooden glides and they were shedding sawdust on everything below the drawer. I kept the uppers (just as sturdy), mostly, and added new drawer bases on one side of the kitchen. I live in an older house, and I also have some vintage cabinets on one side of the room. It makes for a quirky kitchen, but I prefer to think of it as character.

I kept my cabnetry (16 yrs old) and added 3 new pieces to match it (when we built an addition that added an alcove to our kitchen for this purpose). The cabinet maker custom made the door/drawer fronts to match our existing. Same with the stain. It looks great, and no one can tell they weren't all installed at once. IKEA may be inexpensive, but there's no way they were as inexpensive as the 3 custom pieces made to match.

I have a similar question - we are remodeling our new-to-us 1948 home w/ original kitchen. We're ripping out the base cabinets & original counter, but would like to keep some of the painted wood wall cabinets, which are sturdy and cute. But we'd like to add open shelving or glass-front cabinets on either side of the existing wall cabinets -- and we want all of it to work together. So any tips on how to make old & new work together would be welcome!

We just updated our kitchen and added a new pantry cabinet. I got an unfinished one and stained to match our original cabinets. I love it and it blends right in with the rest of the kitchen.

Our uppers were in great shape but the base cabinets were largely in bad shape. During our kitchen renovation we built this galley kitchenette in our basement by combining the usable cabinets with 2 IKEA base cabinets and an IKEA butcher block countertop. I had planned to paint the original cabinets to match, but decided I liked the combination. I think that same idea could work in a kitchen by mixing not matching!