Cabinet Sourcing Options for Kitchen Renovation

There are lots of options for how to do cabinets in a kitchen renovation. Budget is often the biggest consideration for most people but I would also consider your time frame, your DIY skills, and what look you want in your kitchen. If you really want white cabinets, that are lots of high quality budget options. If you want a unique French blue with a specific door style (like I do for the farmhouse) then your budget options quickly diminish. Ask yourself if you can compromise slightly on the look you are dreaming of to save significant money. For me, I didn’t want a kitchen that looks like my white kitchen at home and so I decided to stick with my very unique cabinet goals and have found other ways to save on the budget.

Here are your 5 main choices with a kitchen renovation listed from most budget friendly to least:

1. Use existing cabinets but paint them and change out hardware. If the cabinets are in good condition and you like the layout of the kitchen, this is by far the cheapest way to update your kitchen. You may want to consider paying a professional to paint the cabinets. Even if you are good at painting a wall, it is much trickier to have cabinets look good. Make sure any professional you hire has painted kitchen cabinets before and has some pictures of their work. You can also take out some upper cabinets and put floating shelves to give a more updated look for not a lot of money.

2. Keep existing cabinets but change out the door and drawer fronts. This is what I did when I renovated my home’s kitchen. I did change the layout so some cabinets were removed and an island was added, but most of the base cabinets (that were a high quality solid cherry wood) remained in the same place. We painted the box fronts of the cabinets and had the cabinet maker that was building the island for us do new doors and drawer fronts. Even though the paint color and sheen are supposed to be the same, unfortunately the cabinet fronts and doors are a tiny bit off but I can live with that to save 1000’s of dollars. We also ended up doing all new upper cabinets because the old ones didn’t go to the ceiling one of my biggest kitchen pet peeves.

3. Go to a big box store like Lowes or Home Depot and use their in-stock cabinets. This is what I have done for both our guest cottage and the meadow cabin. We had a little flexibility with size since we were building both of these structures from scratch. I was ok that they weren’t my favorite door style (I love a good shaker cabinet). The trade off in price was huge. You can now get shaker cabinets that are stock but they are only in a few colors which can be fine. If you care more about the color of your cabinets and have some flexibility with layout, using raw wood stock cabinets is probably the cheapest option out there (if you can install them yourself or have a reasonably priced handyman to do it).

4. Use a big box store, Ikea, or an online company of stock cabinets. I did this for my son’s house when we pretty much gutted his kitchen in his A-frame house (read more on my blog, Interested in Reimagining Your Space?). There are some great online options of solid wood cabinets that you put together yourself and some that come already assembled. There are better size options and quality of cabinet options than the standard stock cabinets that are in stock at a big box store. If you are ordering them, you need to see how long it will take to get to you. I also have family members who have had great success with Ikea. You can go to the store and see a bunch of different kitchens in person and then their designer will help you lay it out for no extra charge.

5. Hire a local cabinet maker to do custom cabinets. This is obviously the most expensive option but may not be as expensive as you think. We were planning on doing option 4 at the farm and so I spent countless hours figuring out a way to use the stock cabinet sizes from companies with solid wood cabinets with shaker doors in a blue I liked for a very tricky space. I finally found a company that had a lot of variety in stock sizes and we were able to put together a layout that would work. Total cost was going to be just over $6000 with a sale going on. I then checked reviews of the company right before I placed my order. They were horrible. Pictures of badly damaged cabinets. Stories of months and months waiting for replacements. We don’t have months and months to wait in case they come damaged. Discouraged, I reached out to the local folks, Hills Custom Cabinets, who had done the island and door fronts in my kitchen in 2017. They are winding down their business and only do word of mouth referral for the most part now. They could come measure the kitchen in a few days and have them done in a few weeks! The quote was less than $3000 more than the online company and that included installation! Since nothing is square in that kitchen (there is literally 4 inches difference), getting these custom built and installed in such a timely manner was worth the money.