Paint if your wood is oak and you want a real color change. Spraying costs you $2,000 to $6,500 against $1,500 to $5,000 to strip back to bare wood and refinish. Oak takes a new stain badly. Maple takes it evenly.
The kitchens people bring to Custom Cabinets Lynn for this split into two groups, and knowing which one you are in settles it faster than any sample door. Turn one of your doors over and look at the grain on the back.
Oak has open pores you can feel with a fingertip. Those pores take color differently from the wood around them. So a new stain lands blotchy, and the change reads as a wash sitting over the old color. Oak is also the wood most likely to be the 1980s layer in a house here rather than the original.
Maple is close and even, so it takes a stain uniformly. It is also the better of the two under paint, because it has no open pore to show through the finish.
That is your fork. If you have oak and you want it lighter or grayer, paint is the honest route. Filling the grain before the primer is what stops the pores reading through. If you have maple, or original wood you would rather keep on show, stripping and refinishing keeps the grain and costs about the same.
Stripping in a house this old costs more than it looks like it should. In a home built before 1978 the rules do not let anybody burn or heat-gun old paint off. So your original wood comes back with chemical stripper and hand work. That is most of the reason your strip-and-refinish quote sits alongside the paint quote rather than under it. The lead rules set out the rest.
Where your wood is genuinely original to a period house, we usually argue for keeping it. A painted 1920s kitchen cannot be walked back. Stripping paint off original wood later costs far more than the finish did. Our cabinet cost guide prices both, and the best paint for kitchen cabinets covers the product side.
Related questions
Can oak be stained darker rather than lighter?
Darker works far better than lighter, because you are adding color rather than fighting what is already there. We price restaining by area at $4 to $15 a square foot, and it is the cheaper half of this decision by some way.
Will the grain show through paint?
On oak, yes, unless we fill the pores first. Some people want that and ask us to leave it. Where you do not, filling the grain is extra prep, and it sits inside the 20% to 45% surcharge that heavy preparation carries.
Is a two-tone kitchen a compromise or a cop-out?
It is often the right answer in an old house. Painted wall cabinets over a stained island or a stained base run keeps some of your original wood on show and still gives you the light you wanted. It costs no more than doing it all one way.