Selecting Cabinets
When it comes to cabinets, there are a couple of ways to
go. You could decide to just reface your existing cabinets, or go
with brand new cabinets.
Refacing Cabinets
Our experience was that the cost of refacing, depending
on the quality selected, was sufficiently close enough to the cost of
new (but not custom) cabinets. Refacing made sense to us if the
quality of your existing cabinets was relatively high and the cabinets
just need a "face lift." Be careful when selecting a refacing
company. Get at least three different quotes and be sure to select
a company that has a show room where you can examine the quality of
their materials before you sign the contract. A
cabinet refacer will remove all the drawers and doors from your cabinets
and just reface what is left. Then they will install all new doors
and drawers. When done right, it has the effective result of new
cabinetry. In our situation, the quality of the
cabinets was poor. They were not even really cabinets in the real
sense, they were just a framework of press-board material with shelving
and doors. As such, they could not even be transplanted to the
garage. In fact, during tear out, once they started taking it down
it pretty much all just fell apart. I do not recommend the
refacing option on such poor quality "cabinets."
New Cabinets
This project installed new
cabinetry. If this is your chosen route, again there are a couple
of ways to go. You can select cabinets from a custom cabinet shop,
or if you are skilled enough and have all the woodworking "toys," you can even make
the cabinets yourself. If you are fortunate enough to be able to
do the job yourself, you can save a great deal of money because the
retail mark-up on kitchen cabinets is quite high.
Another way to go is to use pre-fabricated cabinets such
as what you will find in the "big box" stores such as Home Depot or
Lowes. The choice here depends on your budget. If you think
your budget will not allow custom made cabinets, it might still be worth while
to check out some custom cabinet makers in your area. Because of
the retail mark-up on cabinets, you might find the custom cabinet makers
competitive with the big box stores. This
project used prefabricated, non-custom cabinets, however we did not purchase
through any of the big box stores. Just as there are small, custom
cabinet operators, there are also small independent operators that deal
with the same non-custom brands sold in the big box stores. We
felt that we got better service from our independent operator than we
would have if we went with one of the big box stores. That said,
we have heard both good and bad stories from people who went with either
Home Depot or Lowes, as well as independent operators. Do your
homework, talk to lots of people in your area, see their kitchens, and
get some recommendations.
Evaluating Cabinets
So off you go to the big box stores to look at cabinets.
There are several different brands on display, so how do you evaluate
them? One of the tools we used was Consumer
Reports (http://www.consumerreports.org).
It's not only useful for evaluating cabinets, but will also come in
handy when you start looking at appliances as well. We recommend
subscribing to the web site over the magazine, because the web site
gives you access to their searchable archives that you won't have access
to if you just get the magazine. On our latest
view of the site, for some reason they have taken down their cabinet
ratings. Possibly they are in the process of updating those
ratings. However, they still have great tips on what to look for
in a cabinet. Home Depot carries Thomasville,
Kraftmaid, American Woodmark, Ascentia, and do-it-yourself options.
Home Expo also carries additional brands such as Omega.
Lowes carries Kraftmaid, Diamond, Continental, and
others. Based on their reputation particularly
among the independent operators, we recommend avoiding the Kraftmaid
brand. We ran into too many reports of quality issues, length of
time to solve problems, and installation issues.
It is worthwhile to note that several of the major brands
are actually divisions of the same company, MasterBrand Cabinets, Inc.
You can see the list of brands they have at
http://www.masterbrand.com/brands/index.cfm
Popular brands owned by MasterBrand that you will recognize once you
start shopping around are Omega, Decora, and Diamond. We found
these brands have good reputations for quality, particularly the Omega
brand, which also tends to be higher priced. Home Expo, owned by Home
Depot, carries the Omega brand. We went with the Decora brand of cabinets that we
found only through an independent operator. We are very happy with
the result and feel that the cabinets are of good quality. When we
ran into an issue, which we will discuss later, a Decora representative
was in our home in short order and was committed to solving the problem
to our satisfaction. |
