Thursday, November 15, 2007

How long does it take to plot a kitchen?

Eric and I "dropped by" Lowe's tonight to get a kitchen cabinet estimate. We'd taken careful measurements and created a precise drawing of the current kitchen (empty box) and where each door, window and electric outlet sits. We'd poured over the various cabinet catalogs and had selected the brand (KraftMaid) and the style (Sonata Cherry Square) that we are most interested in. We got to the counter at 5:30PM and found a little placard that read "To make sure you get the attention you deserve, please schedule a time with a member of our kitchen design team." We saw Steve, coincidentally the guy who owns the plumbing company who's doing all of our plumbing at the new house but moonlights at Lowe's. I said, "oops, I guess we need to schedule an appointment!" Imagine my surprise when Steve says, "no, I can take care of it tonight!" So we sat down and made further decisions about stain color, glass panel designs and location, cabinet configuration (shelves vs. drawers), cabinet height (I'd really love for them to go to the ceiling), guess-timated appliance sizes and so much more. Steve plugged the multitude of cabinets into the computer design program one at a time as we electronically moved around the room in computer graphic 3-D. It was sometime after 9PM when all of the cabinets were finally placed, glass doors designated, the island situated and plotted and Steve pressed the "calculate" button. It was probably about what we expected, but still painful to witness in writing. I've had it in my head that we'd go with IKEA cabinets, but the prospect of assembling them AND THEN hanging them all makes that a daunting proposition. And yet, I'll have to compare the prices and see if there's some ridiculously significant savings to be gained that would make me seriously reconsider it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

My wife and I remodeled the kitchen in our last place and used Lowes for Kraftmaid cabinets and their installation. For our kitchen on Morris Place, we used Custom Cupboards ( http://www.customcupboards.com/)from a local supplier and had our contractor install them. The difference in quality is dramatic, and the prices are very comparable. Our installation is much better too. My feeling now is that we really... really overpaid for cabinets and especially installation from Lowes.

I've been keeping up with your blog, and the house is looking great. If you want any specifics on the cabinets we used, right down to sizes and prices, I have .pdf's of most of it.

But seriously, shop around before you decide on Lowes.

Anonymous said...

Tina and I put together and installed all of our own cabinets because, well, there was no chance that we could afford them otherwise. You will save thousands of dollars and really it isn't difficult to put them together or install them. The main thing is that you will be spending time versus spending money and you have to decide which one is worth more to you right now. Like I said, this decision was made for us since we didn't have the money.