When people first go looking for their home equity, two products show up: the cash-out refinance and the HELOC. Loan officers tend to pitch whichever one their shop sells best. Here's the difference that actually matters.
A cash-out refi replaces your entire mortgage. New loan, new rate on the whole balance, closing costs measured in thousands, and a fresh amortization clock, which means you start over in the years where payments barely touch principal. In exchange you get a one-time pile of cash and one fixed payment. If your existing rate is higher than today's market, a refi can make sense on its own merits. If you're sitting on a low fixed rate, repricing your whole balance to extract equity is an expensive way to get at your own money.
A HELOC leaves your first mortgage alone. It sits behind it as a second lien, costs little or nothing to open, and gives you a revolving line instead of a pile. You draw what you need, pay it down, draw again. For paycheck parking and chunking, that revolving behavior isn't a nice-to-have, it's the whole mechanism. A refi hands you cash once and the door closes behind you. The line is a door that stays open, which is exactly what the hub in this strategy needs to be.
The honest comparison: the refi usually wins on rate, the line wins on flexibility, and the refi's rate advantage applies to your entire mortgage while the line's higher rate applies only to a small working balance. Run both against your actual numbers, the way the first-chunk math does, before believing either pitch.
A refi that pulls equity out as spending money reverses everything this site teaches. Equity you extract needs a job that pays better than the interest it now costs you. A kitchen you'll enjoy is a purchase, and that's fine, but call it a purchase, not a strategy.