8 things about kitchen cabinets you (probably) didn’t know

As a real estate investor, I’ve done a few kitchen remodels over the years. Here are some of the tips I wished I had known earlier.

1. The most finicky cabinets are the corner ones. You would think by now that we would have a ton of corner cabinet options, but most of those options are on the inside of the cabinet. The size of the cabinets still all tend to be within a few inches of each other. So don’t expect to be able to squeeze a small corner cabinet into your kitchen. They don’t really make ’em small anymore.
2. Custom cabinets are not “the most expensive option.” In fact, some carpenters/cabinet builders are basically as cheap as you can get, since they don’t have much overhead in their business. Get some quotes, and you’ll see what I mean, but warning: last I checked, most cabinet builders in the Upstate of SC were at least six months backed up on orders.
3. Custom cabinets are the most difficult option. My relationship with contractors is that I can’t live with them and can’t live without them. Cabinet builders are just very niche contractors, so the same stereotypes with general contractors – lack of organization, unresponsive, scatterbrained, etc. – can be true of cabinet builders as well. In other words, expect the process to take a long time and pray for patience.
4. Home Depot and Lowes have the worst price/quality ratio. In other words, from the experiences I’ve had, you get the least amount for your money going with Home Depot/Lowes. A small kitchen with them could easily cost double what a custom cabinet builder would cost and likely wouldn’t be as high quality.
5. Home Depot and Lowes are the simplest option. If ease is more important than price or quality, by all means, go to Home Depot/Lowes. They have the kitchen thing down to a science, and you’ll have your new kitchen in no time.
6. IKEA is cheap but not that cheap. Remember that when buying IKEA, you have to pay for each piece (including hinges, drawers, etc.) and that can add up. Plan on a small kitchen costing around $8-10k and up from there.
7. Building IKEA cabinets isn’t hard but it is quite time consuming. I built a small IKEA kitchen this past summer, and it took me about 40 hours despite the fact that I knew what I was doing, having had ample IKEA experience in the past. It also took several hours to design the kitchen on their not-so-user-friendly software platform.
8. Sometimes replacing the cabinet doors is the best thing to do. Want to make a cabinet look new without paying for it to be new? Hire someone to make new cabinet doors, and you’ll save 80-90% of the price of replacing the entire cabinet.