The Process of Selecting Kitchen Cabinets Within Your Desired Budget & Style
Believe it or not, cabinets are a big piece of the custom home design and build process. We live in our kitchens. We entertain and raise our families there. Through good times and bad, we cook amazing meals and even have great disasters in our kitchen space. In fact, we can thank all of these reasons for the rise of open floor plans. Simply put, people want to see and live in their kitchens—which is why the design selections in that area have become extremely important.
Back in the day, kitchens used to be hidden away. Now, cabinets have become a part of the entire aesthetic and theme of your home.
Unfortunately, this means they’re pricier than ever before.
For Springhouse, not only does this mean putting more time and work into making these cabinet selections, but getting them within a budget our clients feel comfortable with.
In this blog post, we’ll share some of our experiences as architects and as a design-build group to help you select the right cabinets for your custom home or renovation.
Preliminary Design & Design Development: Let’s Talk Details
The first time you’ll hear us talking about your kitchen is during the preliminary design step in phase one of the architectural process. When sketching and modeling your kitchen layout, we’ll meet to discuss where the kitchen will be, how it's connected to other spaces in your home, the circulation path, how many people will be using it, how you want to entertain from it, and more. The selection of your kitchen cabinets won’t happen at that time, but the placement will certainly come into play.
Once preliminary design is complete, we’ll get into the nitty-gritty details during the design development step in phase two. Where do the cookie sheets go? Are you right-handed or left-handed? How do you load the dishwasher? Do you want a pullout trash drawer? Do you want warming drawers? What about the microwave? You get the idea!
Cabinet Selection Pricing & Style
Shortly after design development, we’ll head to the pricing phase of selecting kitchen cabinets. Not only does this take your budget into account, but also what kind of brand, style and installer you want. Do you want it painted or stained? Do you want knife drawers? Cabinet separators? Pull-out shelves? That kind-of thing.
Translation? Everything has a price tag and everything is a pretty important decision.
What we typically do is meet with several cabinet suppliers—at least two or three. This helps us compare pricing, available selection, and overall service. When we meet with them, we'll make a few preliminary decisions, like seeing the same cabinets in different colors with roll-out drawers and soft-closed doors, for example.
Currently, we’re working on a full-service project with a client of ours. They’re breaking ground soon, and we’re working through the selections in the meantime. While it’s a high-end home, they chose for their cabinet allowance to be middle-of-the-road, budget-wise.
Upon meeting the supplier, we gave them our client’s budget, expecting selections within that range. Unfortunately, the supplier returned with selections that were double our budget. After giving the supplier a second chance, he came back with selections that were only 10% lower. We decided to walk away after wasting a month of our time.
Our client also priced out a full design from Ikea—which wasn’t a bad idea. The cabinets are beautiful. Plus, they’ll put them together for you and even install them, just like any other cabinet supplier. This ended up being way below their budget!
The final cabinet supplier we went to was a little over the budget, but they presented a list of ways they could potentially meet the budget spot-on. It was a promising service, and they turned it around quickly. Not to mention, the kitchen designer had a lot of experience. This was the winner!
Ultimately, we ended with three options: the first quote was too high, the second was in-between, and the last was well below. This is why we love seeing at least three suppliers!
The Goal: Always Plan Ahead
Every budget is as unique as your custom home—we won’t always use the same supplier with every client. True, cabinets may be more expensive these days, but there’s always a solution. Rushing through the process usually creates problems, especially when it comes to kitchen cabinet selection. We need to take the time to get to the bottom of your priorities and explore as many suppliers as we can. The design of your kitchen does not hinge on how much you're planning to spend. All we need to do is plan ahead!
Have any questions?
Although we covered a lot in this post, you may still have some other questions about the process of selecting cabinets for your custom home. Whether you’re involved in the custom home process now, or even just considering it, join our free Facebook group—we’ll help you answer any questions you might have! Also, feel free to invite anyone that you think would benefit from this collaborative. You’ll not only get advice from me, but from other people who have been through this, too.
Start the process.
When it comes to designing and building a custom home, nothing beats having a trusted, experienced team of architects on your side. Let’s set up a call to meet, discuss your goals, answer your questions, and settle your fears. We can’t wait to meet you!