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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.