Rutt is a very good manuf. - but don't waste your time if CP was $75k and it gave you pause.

Try Plain & Fancy....a LOT less than Crownpoint or Woodmode! They make a beautiful cabinet with an awesome finish!

Here is a link that might be useful: Plain & Fancy

Also consider a custom cabinet maker - you often can get a much better price and they can copy any particular cabinet style that you like.

I second the custom cabinet maker. Mine are build exactly the way I want, but at least 1/2 if not more than Crown Point.

The first place to start cutting costs on a cabinet quote is to examine the plan. Sounds like you're planning a large upper end kitchen with many details---a $150-200K remodel. The size and the details are what make any quote $$$, especially since you indicate you only want upper end choices in your cabinetry. I'm sure you've done the "is my renovation overrenovating for my neighborhood" assessment, so sometimes, if you're at the higher end, you just can't get away from paying those prices if you want that level of detail at that quality.

Near that price range we were able to have beautiful custom cabinetry made locally, by a great builder who showed up frequently to double check measurements and tweak the installation, and who made great contributions to the design of the kitchen. So I third the custom cabinet maker if you can find a builder whom you like and whose price suits you. Plus it's helpful for your local economy!

Have fun
Lynn

as others have suggested above, i would recommend you also check with local cabinet makers. i was going to go with omega/dynasty but after checking locally for $1500 more i got an entire set of custom cabinets with all the exact details i wanted as opposed to semi-custom. it is more work to go custom - you have to specify everything, but you get much more as well. local cabinet makers are hurting for work right now so prices are good. make sure you read the threads on how to select a cabinet maker and payment terms. some co's are not weathering the economy well so you need to choose carefully.

i just got my cabinets delivered yesterday and they are beautiful! well worth the extra specification work required.

Thanks, everybody.
We used a custom cabinet maker when we built this place 24 years ago. Their work is still beautiful. We plan to do a mix of painted wall units and cherry islands. We had originally planned to go with a local cabinet maker; but I did a lot of research-- much of it on the Garden Web-- and concluded that the big chains have advantages, especially with paints. Our place can handle the remodel costs in terms of the neighborhood real estate values-- although we never plan to sell so aren't focused on that. It's just that a 750 sq ft project (300 kitchen demolition/remodel and 450 addition of which 300 is kitchen addition) is looking to cost nearly what we paid to build a high end custom 3600 sq ft home in 1987.

I will look at P&F. I have looked at Woodmode and concluded that there was no reason to go from CP to them. I had heard lots of good stuff about Rutt but if they are more than CP, that is not an option.

We do like Omega-- we have seen several finished Omega projects that are quite beautiful. Frankly tho' we have seen nothing as nice (to us given what we want to achieve) as what we have seen from CP painted/stained combos here and in their online gallery.

I am realizing that my real problem is that loving wife and I built our first home entirely by ourselves,designed and oversaw the construction of our second home, and built our 2000 sq ft stables and woodworking shop by ourselves. Now that I am retired and not as strong or fast as I once was, LW questions whether I should do it myself-- actually she questions my sanity in even considering it. I would love to do it but understand her concerns. On the other hand, I know what materials cost; and I can do pretty darn good cabinet work. So, when I see people wanting an arm and a leg for good work, I always tend to compare it to what it would cost us if I did it. I know it is unrealistic to do so.

Arrgh ...

Will

Will, it sounds like you are working through several decisions -- not only which cabinet company but whether in fact to go with a cabinet company or do it yourself.

If cabinet company, you might want to look at Kennebec and Cook&Cook-- small companies, beautiful cabinets.

We went through a similar dialogue. My DH really wanted to keep the gumwood and build the new cabinets using (restoring) the old gumwood. Perhaps we could have found someone to do what he is doing but we could not have afforded it -- it is so painstaking to conserve all the old wood, replane, refit, resize, refinish. It has taken much longer than we had anticipated, and we have had many challenges along the way. I'm not sure I would recommend this, even though we are glad we saved our gumwood and the kitchen is finally starting to look good. Unless you are trying to do something that is really unique and demands that you do it yourself, I would suggest going with a good cabinet maker. Life is short.

I am getting my Crown Point cabinets in a couple of weeks. I went through similar sticker shock first with Signature then Crown Point. After I learned a lot about pricing I was able to reduce the cost of my cabs from my original Signature quote of $45K to getting my cost under $27+ with Crown Point.

I had complete control of the project with CP because they furnish a line by line invoice. By rearranging appliances, condensing smaller cabs into larger ones, etc I maximized cab space while, saving a fortune and still getting the look I want.

I am certain that you can get beautifully constructed cabinets from a local cabinet building (or one of the Amish cabinet makers) for considerably less than CP, if budget is an issue. You've gotten good advice in this thread on that point. The most beautiful kitchens on Gardenweb have consistently been the ones built by local cabinet makers.

I will add however, that one of the things, as a person on a budget myself, that I've loved about working with Crown Point is that they are responsive to budget constraints (of course to the extent that a high-end company can be!) Also, they don't nickel and dime. That is, my quote included all the moldings, inserts, and even the hardware and knobs and pulls. Every time I've asked, "will there be an upcharge on this, or that?" the answer has been "no". Plus, they are also just so darn pleasant to work with, which is pretty priceless these days.

Best wishes for what promises to be a beautiful new kitchen and addition to a well-loved home. We look forward to seeing your kitchen plans unfold.

Have you looked at Brookhaven? They are the lower end cabinets of Woodmode, but just as beautiful and made very similar. The price difference was tremendous. Our cabinets from Brookhaven cost about 36K and I think with Woodmode the cost would have been over 50K++. They are made very well, have alot of great features and overall extremely happy with the cabs.
Good Luck!

My Rutt cabinets cost about $70,000, 9 years ago (in the NY metro, if that matters).

I dont think my cabinet order was a particularly large one. Ive attached a link that has two pics (very blurry, sorry, need to take more). The pics include one of the galley area and one of the eating area. Our galley area was about 18-19'. On one side, it was all cabs with a set of freezer drawers, and all glass uppers. On the other side, there were no uppers, a range, sink and d/w, and the run ends with a double oven (ie on that side most of it was not cabinetry)

The only other cabinets wrapped around from the side with the uppers. There was a built in subzero flanked by large pull out pantries of the same height (at the time they were a new thing and very pricey, I think 7-10k for just those), then a very large built in trash with a cabinet above. This portion was maybe 10' long?

The finish wore very well and the cabinets worked beautifully for 9 years and three kids from 0-12 today.

Hope that helps?

Here is a link that might be useful: nearly useless photos of my old kitchen

Rutt just came out with a new step-down line called Rutt Regency. It is about 20% less than the full line.

Hi Will,
Just wanted to chime in with my two cents...

If you are looking at Crown Point, I assume you are after Inset Cabinetry?

I put CP in my house and have been very happy with them. When I was shopping I looked at many different cabinet lines that had a good reputation with Inset. I REALLY wanted inset and sort of wasn't willing to go with full overlay to get the cost down but if this is a possibility for you that would certainly help matters.

I looked at Woodmode and they were even more $$ than the CP price. It is true that Brookhaven now makes two inset door styles and they apparently did this to bring the price down for customers looking at inset. There is a 50% off door premium sale right now so that would help with the Brookhaven inset door premium.

I also looked at Plain and Fancy and got a very reasonable price from them but felt more comfortable with what I read about the paint finishing from CP.

I now work at a kitchen showroom and we sell a line that I was not familiar with when I was shopping. The showroom I work in is primarily a Woodmode/Brookhaven dealer but they brought in the Greenfield line for those customers looking for inset at more reasonable prices. You may want to check this out.

I saw someone's finished kitchen pictures on here recently with Greenfield (full overlay) and it looked gorgeous. The paint samples we have in the showroom are gorgeous. The colors are so current.

Hope this helps.

Mamadadapaige,
I am so happy I stumbled upon your post. I just got a quote for Greenfield. I asked about inset and was told that it was a 40% upcharge, so I had them quote me in full overlay. Could this showroom emplyee have been mistaken, or could Greenfield make different arrangements with dealers?
THe price was not bad, considering that they seem to be a quality cabinet, but then again, I cant find much info on them.
How much is the upcharge for Greenfield inset where you work, if you dont mind me asking? Thanks

I have to ask, what are the noticeable differences between a beaded inset, all plywood cabinet from Shiloh and a Crown Point cabinet?

Coffeebeantown, I'll be curious to hear how mamadadapaige responds to your questions since she is now in the cabinet biz.

I looked at Shiloh and was impressed. I believe these are three differences between Shiloh and Crown Point.

1. Crown Point is fully custom. If you need a cabinet that is 34.3 inches wide, you can get it.

2. Crown Point has 1" thick face frames, doors and drawer fronts for a very sturdy look and feel. I believe that Shiloh had a 3/4 inch cabinet box. They also seemed sturdy. So it is just a matter of how sturdy you want to go.

3. Shiloh has a pretty brushed finish (an up charge, I believe). But you have to use one of their paint colors. Crown Point will pretty much paint your cabinets in any color or paint (standard, milk paint, Farrow and Ball colors) you want. If you order Farrow and Ball paint, it is truly brush painted, not sprayed.

I hope others will chime in with other differences. Or, perhaps they will say that for most consumers these differences are no big deal.

We have Shiloh inset- I'd really recommend you look at them. Very happy with them. We thought we spent a fortune on them (lots of details) but this thread is making me feel a lot better! If you have unlimited money, I guess why not on a full custom painted in milk paint (i like milk paint!), but if you are just trying to find cabinets that will last a long time and look expensive/elegant, I really don't think you need to spend 75 or 100k. I don't know the size of your kitchen of course and if you are in a market of 200K remodels maybe you will get it back, but from a functional perspective, I cannot see why it's necessary. Its a kitchen cabinet, not a military warship or tornado safe room.

I have been working on the pricing of some custom kitchens the last few days from people of a home show I recently attended. I wish I knew where more suckers were that would pay 75k for their cabinets. Geppetto is a completly custom company with a book set up in 3" increments so you can create a price for a kitchen in 2020 software on the fly with you customer. Beaded face frame openings for the entire kitchen cost me $500 and to change to inset doors and drawers was $1,500. That is $2,000 total cost to go from frameless or full overlay to beaded inset. I can custom color match any existing sample or specify any Sherwin Williams paint or stain. Milk paint, paint on paint distressing galore choices and everything else in between. The total dealer cost on the kitchen is $22,700 I quoted it at $27,757 and would do that all day long. Half of the cabinets are custom size in height or width or both, 13" wall cabinet depth all plywood boxes blumotion dovetail drawers blumotion doors pull out and other accesories in all base cabinets a hood is being built to match an existing fireplace mantle in the room it will be custom color matched for stain color also. The base cabients are being custom color matched to a customer door sample that is just right to their eye they have.

Where do these dealers get these prices you guys are willing pay? Unbelivable. I am definetly stupid when it comes to finding people that pay the prices I see thrown around on here all the time and then I am shocked to read that half of them still require filler strips to be install the kitchen. When you install a row of cabinets between to fixed walls you need a place of adjustment to get it to fit just right. I usually size one cabinet 1/2" short and put an extended stile on the cabinet that can be trimed to fit the row just right. Why would anyone pay that kind of price for cabients that can not be spec'd to any size needed in any combination of height width and depth?

Unbelievable to me.

Dave, I am curious when you say the cabinets are completely custom and that there is a book in 3 inch increments? I thought "completely custom" cabinet makers should not have any 'increment' choices or any boxes that need to be cut down to fit, I would have thought the boxes should be exactly made to fit whatever your size requirements are? Or am I not understanding the increment idea or the cutting down/stile idea?

That was really the point of my question. I ordered Shiloh beaded inset cabinets and the price was very reasonable. I used quotes from multiple Shiloh dealers and made them compete against each other to get the price where I wanted it. The point I was trying to make was how much better is the quality for a $75K cabinet job compared to a really nice Shiloh cabinet job? I'll bet the average person couldn't tell the two kitchens apart.

dave - it's unbelievable because you cannot install that kitchen and sustain a showroom on your markup.

If you work out of the trunk of your car and sell two of those a month, you could earn a few bucks for yourself assuming the client pays you in full upfront and you don't misorder anything and nothing comes damaged and your insurance and phone bills are cheap and advertising costs you nil.

I don't think daveinorlando started his cabinet business this morning, but I'm sure he'll check back and let us know.

I've seen CP cabinets in person, a kitchen that's on their website. They are, as it turns out, kitchen cabinets. Nice cabinets, yes. Custom, and well-built, and the company is good to work with, and all that. Nice finish. But they are not built in place, and don't look it. Nor do they look like fine furniture. They look like, well, kitchen cabinets. I can get the exact same cabinets built to any size from a local custom cab company, match Ben Moore paint, get all Blum hardware, meet the same construction specs, etc. for a fraction of the price.

There are other higher-end cabinets I've seen that truly do look like they were hand made 80 or a hundred years ago, but the ones I've encountered are much more expensive even than CP.

Nothing against CP. But what they make is kitchen cabinets.

ADK, perhaps you could do some of the work yourself and hire out some help to assist you? It is a lot of work and life is short (took us months to recover from our diy) but I do understand how hard it is to pay some of the prices asked for quality cabinets if you have skills. Conestoga has a upper line called "Craftsman"it is all wood cabinetry that has zillions of custom options, inset, stains and paints and top of the line hardware. This is RTA cabinetry ordered online so a lot of extra work. I do not have a comparison price wise in the cabinet lines you are looking at. I do know that my order from cabinetmakerschoice.com for all wood boxes with some painted doors and some stained and glazed was about 1/2 of the cost that Medallion cabinetry quoted. Conestoga has been making cabinet doors forever and makes many of the high-end doors for some of the companies mentioned above. From what you have mentioned about youself I know you know the work involved but incase you forgot... You may feel like your going to die by the time you are done. If you know a woodworker/carpenter to assist then maybe you would enjoy it as it would take a lot of the pressure off.
There is a wonderful man here on GW that has a great example of the cabinets in his beautiful kitchen. He was very ambitious and ordered his unfinished. His name is Casey but my mind is blanking on his handle. Somebril???

So sorry I lost track of this. Will try to get more info on our pricing. designnov, can you post your floorplan here? I will price it using our dealer's pricing and we can see how the difference works out. Will be good practice for me as I have priced plenty of Woodmode/Brookhaven but so far no Greenfield. Or email me... not sure if my email is connected to gardenweb, if not, let me know.

I am still learning the offerings of the showroom being new here and went by what the manager said (namely, that Greenfield is a less expensive inset alternative to Woodmode).

Old River Cabinets is a custom company like Geppetto is with pricing about the same. Old river does not have a book and is a pain to price on the fly because you have to know every little upcharge that is based in their computer system they only have. Geppetto on the other hand has a book with cabinets every 3" with countless modifcation charges that I can apply to any cabinet to make it what ever size I want as I stated in the original post of modifying depth width or height in any combination. If they do not have a cabinet I can start with I have to fax in what I want and wait for a quote back. 3" increments just gives you an easier way to arrive at an exact cost. I can stack them verticaly, I can join them horizontaly up to 8' long for a custom look when they are installed. I can change the doors add a drawer anything you can think of. I can custom color match the fireplace which we are doing. I can custom color match the door sample which has the perfect color wood she wants which she has looked for 2 years to find. She is very picky when it comes to color. Geppetto will make anything I can dream. They are custom just in a manner that is easier to price as a designer who is not a employee of theirs.

My overhead excluding gas is $3,000 a month. This business is about competing with the prices of the next guy. Lowes and Home Depot who's cabinet companies they represent sell approx half of all the cabinets in the US are the largest competition. 50% markups on semi custom products are about what you have to do to compete on price but then you can not compete on being as established as as they are when you are self employed per say. A typical set of semi custom cabinets cost the dealer 4-6k so a mark up would be 2-3k per transaction. Now since most people want to go with the established to big to fail company they will only buy with you if you give them a deal they can not turn down. So you drop your margin to do it if it is possible.

Or you have contractors that want to work with you where the end price to customer is close in price to Lowes and Home Depot but they want money the owner is not aware of which makes you cut your margin in half and share it with the contractor.

So either way you slice it I sell cabinets for the average kitchen that are all plywood dove tail full overlay soft close full extension for 6k most of the time and make $1,200 if you are lucky! So a custom kitchen which takes about twice as much time to figure out as there are many more ways you can layout the kitchen so you do multiple layouts before you find the perfect one for the customer has 400% more profit in it then the semi custom prices of the big box stores. And according to multiple posts on here the competition in supposed "custom" is 50k and up! Where I would be a total price of half that!

I was not trying to make this about me I was more agreeing with the title of the thread of sticker shock shock.

I have other people who buy fix and sell condo's and town houses here in the dc area where the cabinets cost me 900 - 1200 and I mark it up the same 50% to stay competitive. That translates to 450 profit. But wait.... that customer comes from a granite company that wants money for referring the business. So when you give them a 15% discount the profit on those kitchens goes to less then 200 including in home delivery costs.

The industry forces you to work on percent markups. You spend as much time on a small job like that as you do on a semi custom kitchen which pays 1,200 or a custom one which takes a little longer that I doubled the price like other companies do I would make 25-50k on one kitchen? And people want to say that is the way you stay in business because you have overhead? Sticker Shock Shock. I agree. I must be to practical. I just wanted to give some context to the prices and point out that the orignial poster was correct to be shocked in my opinion and state some facts as to why it is true.

Antss is right that it does take money to sustain a showroom. But you do not have to rip off your customer to do it by doubling the price of custom cabinets. How much money do you need to make on one job to stay in business when you are talking about profits upwards of 35k per transaction?

I've been impressed by visiting the Parade of Homes and asking who does the cabs on the models. I've learned about some shops in the state that I never heard of before. Although the kitchens I saw were rather generic because they were spec houses, these shops could work with an informed customer to create some good stuff.

I'm glad we went with a small cab shop with lots of custom software to allow them to plan really custom cabs because I wanted a lot of things that the catalog companies didn't offer. They beat the big box catalog companies in price too.

Anyone know anything about Rutt Regency line and how it runs cost and quality wise in comparison to Greenfield? Someone noted about that it is 20% less than Rutt, but Rutt is uber expensive. Is 20% less still making it high end.

This post has really grown! First, I want to thank you all for the wonderful information. I took a hiatus to do more design work, to retile our fireplace hearth, and to prepare our plans for pulling permits. I just reread all the posts.

The price of this project grows daily. We are still talking with Crownpoint, have gotten one quote on Omega cabinets and have started talking to an excellent local cabinet maker. I looked at one new Omea/Omega Dynasty job. I was disappointed by the quality of the paint. It was a flat white on a mission style overlain door. I at first thought the owner had bought the cabinets with just primer; but I was wrong. The paint job just did not look at all like the samples we had been shown: much lower quality. The boxes were fine, but not up to custom cabinets. By contrast, good friends of ours had Omega stained pecan cabinets installed in their kitchen, and while not a style we would choose, they certainly are beautiful and well made. I cannot understand this discrepancy. I asked the dealer's KD about it-- she was defensive.

Anyway, we are pressing on and hope to get to a conclusion soon. I send PDF's of my "final" designs to CP tomorrow and if they are within shooting distance on price, I'll fly to NH to tour their facility and look at their stuff in person. I have been unable to find any CP owners here in the SW.

Will