Has anybody ordered Kitchen Cabinets online?

[Steppenwolfe]

If you like the styles, I strongly recommend IKEA Kitchen cabinets. The price is very right, and they are amazing. Wood cabinets are very over rated. Unless you are buying high quality customs, they will all be at the least veneered. And the truth is solid door wood cabinets, the tall ones, tend to warp so the veneer is desired in those situations.

We put Ikea in our second home, love it so much our very nice first home will get Ikea next kitchen remodel.

Boy oh boy... here we go. I couldn't disagree more. Particle board is greatly inferior to birch cabinet grade plywood. It doesn't hold up over time nearly as well. And, long door cabinets made out of the proper wood, and kiln dried correctly will last forever. IKEA is considered a mid grade at best, and not a high end product. So, FORGIVE ME for disagreeing, this is my opinion as a General Contractor. Since you like IKEA so well, that's great, please enjoy them. To the OP, check out Conestoga Cabinets online, they are one of the top quality producers of kitchen cabinets out there.

 

[Steppenwolfe]

I just remodeled my kitchen earlier this year. I looked at dozens of cabinet brands, ranging from the cheapest imported junk to the highest priced designer European brands. I learned a few key things:

- The most economical option for decent quality is to find a local distributor of a decent quality imported cabinet.
- Avoid thermofoil and similar coatings on white and colored cabinets.
- Plywood comes in varying degrees of chemical content; here in California we have CARB certification to let consumers know that the formaldehyde content is safe.
- As others have said, there's real wood, solid wood, etc. Plywood is good for the boxes, but how they are assembled is important. Some really cheap cabinets are assembled with brackets, which I would avoid. I would recommend solid wood for the doors, regardless of the color you go with.
- Let the cabinet maker/local distributor assemble them. It cost me $20 per box for assembly.
- If you're installing yourself, take your time and measure twice.
- Cabinets found at Home Depot and Lowe's are about double the cost of what I think they are actually worth (having compared to other products). By the time you order the options for quality you want (plywood boxes, solid doors, etc) the price goes way up.

Here's an example of a good quality cabinet maker I found: J & K Cabinetry Dallas, Houston, Metairie You can e-mail them and ask if they have any distributors in your area.

Great break down. You get an A on doing your homework. ALL WOOD boxes, quality constructed hardwood doors and frames, and professional installation are the keys to a great new kitchen.

 

[TnAndy]

Another option is build your own. Couple thousand in some basic tooling can get you a good start.

I'm way beyond that now, but I built cabinets for some rental homes I built as well as all the base/casings/etc for them, plus done some custom work for others and remodeled my own gutted-to-the-studs kitchen.

I use birch plywood for the casework, then red oak for the face frames and doors. Maple dovetailed drawers, good self closing drawer slides. Nice thing about DIY is you get exactly what you want.

This is our current kitchen: (one raised panel on the end of the island not installed yet in this pic)

Built the bifold doors, that is the washer/dryer.

Appliance 'garage' cabinet is 16" deep.

Over the years, wife found deep drawers way more useful than conventional small drawer over cabinet door type construction, so I put in a lot of drawers.

Sink area. Notice the depth of window extension jambs.....exterior walls are 10" thick.

Cool deal for wife's mixer.....and I'm the receipent of the mixed stuff...ahahaa

Kitchen in one of our rentals:

 

[ustmd]

If you like the styles, I strongly recommend IKEA Kitchen cabinets. The price is very right, and they are amazing. Wood cabinets are very over rated. Unless you are buying high quality customs, they will all be at the least veneered. And the truth is solid door wood cabinets, the tall ones, tend to warp so the veneer is desired in those situations.

We put Ikea in our second home, love it so much our very nice first home will get Ikea next kitchen remodel.

+2 on the Ikea cabinets. We put them in 16 years ago and they still look great.

 

[EddieWalker]

I install whatever my clients want and really don't have too much of a preference. Sometimes my clients order the ones you assemble yourself online and they all seem pretty much the same to me. The biggest difference that I've noticed between the ones you assemble yourself and the already assembled ones like Kraft Maid are the hinges and drawer slides.

I have never seen or herd of any first hand issues with particle board sides or backs on any cabinets. I don't care for particle board, but I think most issues are just personal taste more then anything else. The plywood backs and sides come in different grades and thicknesses. I've seen some issues with half inch plywood, but nothing that didn't square out once installed.

The biggest disasters that I've seen in kitchens and bathrooms are with custom cabinets. They are usually built just fine, but the cabinet makers don't finish them around here, so who you hire to paint or stain them is crucial. Even when you get the very best crew out there, they will never reach the same level of finish as done in a factory that bakes the paint or finish after it's applied. I believe they put them in an over at somewhere around 200 degrees, which gives you a much stronger/harder finish then possible any other way.

 

[Gary Fowler]

My son completely gutted the kitchen in the house he bought and went back with all IKEA parts. He has been happy with it now for over 5 years. I think he hired an installation guy to put everything in which I think is the secret to satisfaction. If you know how and have the tools and help then OK, otherwise get a qualified person to install your cabinets.

When I built my retirement home, I got a custom cabinet maker to make all of mine which were then stained and installed by my building contractor. Maybe more expensive but all solid wood, not one piece of particle board used.

 

[woodlandfarms]

So to the OP, clearly money is an issue. As you can see, the costs will vary wildly, and so will the end results.

To the others. So we have two houses, two kitchens. THe one in LA was remodeled 8 years ago to the tune (for cabinets and granit counters and labor) to about 60K. The Ikea kitchen we got set us back 7K for the cabinets (the labor was free, it was me) and the formica counter top. Both are comparable in size

As noted, custom cabinets suffer from finish issues (especially in CA where the laws are very strict on paints). Our custom kitchen began to suffer within two years. We have wrangled legally with the manufacturer but it has been expensive and generally fruitless. This year the cabinets will be refinsihed (Modern Flat Birdseye Maple).

As for the Ikea cabinets, there are upsides and downsides. The upside is that the cost vs quality are pretty unmatched in my opinion. 3 years into out Ikea kitchen and it looks as good as the day we got it. Downsides are that the ikea drawers are an organizers dream but somewhat ineficent with space. The sides of the drawers are metal and a bit thick. And due to hinge position, pull out drawers can often leave a gap at the very bottom. The process with Ikea is like Home Depot. Bring in your layout and what you are considering for a design and they (ikea, hd) will finess the plan and put together the proper order with all the parts you need.

One thing about Ikea, they take the cabinets back if you mess up. We killed one cabinet bad (Sink cabinet, cut the holes in the floor wrong and screwed up the top where the sink goes). Our friends who have an ikea kitchen said "Oh, just take it back" We did, they handes us a new one no questions asked.

We have the Kraftmade in our bathrooms in the "Ikea" house. Those cabinets are holding up well after 5 years but the fit and finish are not nearly as good as the ikea.

 

[Cord]

I used to remodel homes installing kitchens and have seen the crap that some sell as a "quality" cabinet. Wow. You definetly get what you pay for. For all of my personal projects I've been installing Sherr's cabinets. They are CNC RTA, and everything fits together perfectly. Boxes are plywood, drawers are dovetail with full extension slides and soft close. Typically I order the cabinets European style with full overlay doors. Once you have a full overlay door, you'll never go back to a face frame cabinet box. I typically order the cabinets pre finished with them matching to a door sample that we purchased from a big box store. Don't forget to order the accessory mouldings at the same time so they can be finished to match. The cabinets come via truck and I typically pick up the crate from a freight terminal so I don't have to pay the lift gate fees. Assembly is easy for two people, if not a bit time consuming. It all goes together with out cutting; just wood glue, dowels and cabinet screws. You'll need a large area to assemble the cabinets so I'll typically take the entire garage over and then move the assembled boxes into the room as the installation progresses. The one thing that's slick about RTA is that if door clearances are tight, you can always assemble the oversized corner or pantry cabinets right in the kitchen.

Oh, and take at least one 36-42" wide base cabinet and ditch the doors. Have Scherr's make a 4 drawer cabinet with trays attached to the drawer fronts. The wide shallow tray and full extension slides work awesome for pots and pans. The last kitchen I did had base doors on the corner cabinets and everything else was drawers. It worked awesome; she loved that kitchen.

 

[Cord]

Couple pictures of her favorite kitchen. Sadly the project went south and we sold it a couple months later. The cabinets were oak with a sealer, dark stain and glaze. Typically I don't like oak because with a light stain the grain becomes too strong, this one turned out really neat though.

 

[Cord]

A landry room I built for her at a past home. Storage was really tight in this house, so the upper cabinets were 24" deep and the base cabinets were 36" deep. This gave her a really nice deep counter for folding laundry. I also hid the water heater behind the stacked washer. The base cabinet had full extension slides that were 30" long. The cabinet above the washer was 36" deep and also had full extension slides. Again, Scherr's built the boxes and doors. To save some money, we finished the cabinets ourselves. I wasn't totally satisfied with the finish job we did, so I now have Scherr's finish everything for us.