Did you use Scherr's? I would love to see pics of your kitchen!

We were able to get custom cabs from a local shop for about the same price as RTA's. Call around and get some quotes. Maybe you'll find a cab shop that's a little slow that'll give you a competitive quote.

Check carefully with Scherr's - we're currently doing a small project (72" of upper and lower cabinets) and their RTA pricing came in substantially higher than what we've found with a semi-custom line with the same specs. YMMV.

I used Scherr's, and was quite happy with the results, which are pictured below:

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Another route that many people here have taken is to get the cabinet boxes from Ikea, and to have Scherr's make doors and drawer fronts to fit the Ikea cabinets. This hybrid solution is a way to get a price much closer to the Ikea price, but to get more options for how they look than Ikea offers.

Mobydog, I'll recommend again that you check into Amish/Custom cabinetry. Fully custom, the best quality, and less expensive than Home Depot and the others. It will not hurt you to get an estimate.

Not sure this is helpful, but if your original costs were based on a lot of specialized built-in configurations, consider buying inexpensive inserts (e.g from Rev-A-Shelf and others...).

We just did a reno where we kept our cabs, added a few, and had a local cabinetmaker modify some things. He never got around to some specialized drawer inserts (knife drawer, spice drawer), and I bought inserts for those things at Bed Bath and from Amazon for $10- $15 each. Obviously, huge savings there. We also messed around with a customized pegboard thing for cutting boards and trays that never worked well. Again, bought gizmos from BBB and Amazon that were cheap and worked much better. And with all these things, there's the flexibility to change stuff later on.

Good luck!

Ikea, Ikea, Ikea....... Came in for approx half what the the others wanted for cabs, and that included professional assembly and installation of the Ikea ones (while they others were for cabs alone). If you are handy, you can knock that down to 1/4 of the cost of the other places by doing the assembly and installation yourselves.
It really can't be beat!

another vote for checking out local cabinet makers. the cost was comprable with pre-made and the locals need the work.

one word - ikea.
two words - best value
many words - cant believe that is an ikea kitchen!

(spend your money on nice stone and appliances, get cabs from ikea and install yourself)

^^ What Pharoah said.

We did our last Kitchen ourselves with IKEA and *love* it. We had very little money then. We moved and will be redoing our new kitchen - we have more money now, but we have not seen anything we like as much as IKEA. Unlike Empet - I *love* their metal drawers with the Blum hardware and *many* organizational components. We even did our laundry room and hall closet using the IKEA kitchen cabinets because you just can't beat them. We will probably go with custom doors this time, but only because I want a white kitchen - shaker style painted with BM White Dove - and I can't get that from IKEA. We did the IKEA Adel Medium Brown last time and it was beautiful. But this time, I want a white kitchen. :-)

Yes, I am using Scherr's. I have not taken delivery of the cabs yet.

As dseng points out, Scherr's is not reallllly cheap, but I think it is a good value. My kitchen is 8'x14', and initial estimates for it were about $8k from Scherr's for 3/4" plywood, veneered interiors, and mid-line accouterments. (You can save more off that using particleboard and melamine interiors.) We then upgraded nearly everything you could (glides, hinges, mutliple pantry rollouts, stained finish, drawers, stacked upper cabs....) and got the price up to about $14k. Cabinets by Crystal came in a few thousand more than that for the same setup.

I really love the many Ikea drawers we got and find them so easy to clean. We did not need to use any liners at all.
I never felt comfortable with wood interiors because I worried they did not clean as completely with the wood's nooks and crannies and I am not a fan of wet wood after cleaning. The Ikea innards wipe perfectly clean and I really like the metal sides. I can't see the drawer construction as anything but a good feature. I also like that if a drawer somehow were to be problematic, you can swap one out for very cheap. I have had wood drawers all my life and when one goes hinky, you are stuck with it.

BTW - Ikea now sells an induction cooktop for $1k. I don't recall them having that last year when we got our kitchen there. I had noticed that their white wall ovens were nicely designed, but I have not done any research on their appliances as we already owned ours before we shopped Ikea for the cabs.

bob_cville,

Which door style did you use on your cabinets? They are nice. Did you have to finish them, or do they come finished? What stain did you use?

CCinTX,

The doors are Scherr's style 400 shaker, the drawer fronts are style 540. I originally planned to finish them myself, but then changed my plan so that more of the rest of the remodel was going to be DIY, so I decided to have Scherr's finish the cabinets.

For the color I took the quarter-sawn red-oak sample door they originally shipped to me, stained it the color I wanted, and shipped it back to them. The color I used was MinWax Special Walnut, with a coat of oil-based satin polyurethane. They color-matched the result by first using a dilute yellow toner, followed by a commercial grade stain designed to color-match the MinWax Special Walnut, followed by a "Clear Non-Yellowing SHER-WOOD Catalyzed Acrylic Conversion Coating".

This was a big part of what I loved about working with Scherr's, the way you decide what you want, and they make it, rather than them providing a list of what your choices are, and you selecting the one that comes closest.

Cabinets are the last place you should be cutting your budget when it comes to a kitchen remodel. They are the most permanent element of the kitchen and cannot be easily changed out down the road. Be sure that the cabinets you choose will be able to outlast your other budget compromises replacement with quality items. It doesn't do any good to skimp and go with laminate counters and cheap cabinets only to find out that those cheap cabinets aren't gonna support your granite later on.

Ikea is a great choice for inexpensive decent quality cabinets for someone on a budget. They will come in at about half the price of where any other good quality cabinet line will start. If you find something less than double Ikea, then there is some shortcut in quality that you aren't seeing, like being Chinese made or low quality plywood or some other issue. Ikea does huge worldwide volume, so they can afford for their markup to be less than standard and still make a good profit.

Perhaps you should post your layout and some of your other component choices and you can receive comments on where you can cut costs without sacrificing the bones of the kitchen. I'm assuming that you are going to be DIYing a significant portion of the labor, as that's the easiest way to save money. If not, then drop back and get some DIY experience under your belt before you tackle this project, and you can save thousands.

We shopped around a lot when planning our kitchen. I looked into IKEA but I didn't like the idea of fillers from any of the pre fab cabinet makers and the idea of ordering when we hadn't seen them in person made me nervous(they don't have a store in our area). We shopped the local custom guys and the big box stores.

At Lowes the price for our cabinets were around 12,000 without install. The custom guy we went with is under 6,000 including install and finishing and he sends it off after he makes it to be finished with a similar quailty finish the the factory made. Since he custom makes the boxes to fit we don't have any fillers, I don't have to worry about fitting it into the standard sizes, ex: I have a 20 1/4'' drawer set. Oh and he didn't charge any extra to do full height cabinets over the 36'' and full overlay/frameless. We also did drawers for almost all of the lowers, deep cabinet over the fridge and 30''deep lowers on the island. The price is for solid wood construction blum hinges and we opted for the metal box sides since they hold up forever. My husband works in commercial construction and said they always do metal sides since it is so durable but it is expensive so he was thrilled that the cabinet guy didn't charge more.

Oh and we had the cabinet guy make us a sample of the upper cabinet so we could see exactly what we are getting. To give you an idea of our kitchen cabinet size we have two 12' runs and a 6' island. The cabinet price also includes crown for everything, two bathroom vanities, a laundry sink cabinet and uppers in the laundry over the w/d. Another thing I really love about the custom guys, whenever I have an idea he tells me "we can do whatever you want" so if it is something out of the norm they can almost always make it happen.

Not pushing it, but with scherrs, you get a whole kitchen discount for either an entire kitchen or a entire kitchen's worth of doors and drawer fronts.

Sometimes it can be worth taking a look at special features, moldings and customization charges to see what's driving the pricing beyond what you expected. In our original remodel, I looked at doing some add ons from Kraftmaid and the price of just the add on cabinets was 4 thousand dollars more than we ending up spending on the entire remodel. We went with Scherrs, plywood, wood doors, wood veneer interiors and were very pleased with them - they went together easily and were very customized.

In the disaster remodel, we didn't have even that money, so we went with ikea plus Scherrs doors and drawer fronts that we liked instead of ikea doors. Oddly enough, we saved money over buying ikea doors.

"I looked into IKEA but I didn't like the idea of fillers"

95% IKEA + one or two Scherr's custom-sized boxes would eliminate the fillers. If you accept the maths others have posted to show that lower corner cabinets are not worth having, you have to have fillers in the corners anyhow. Finally, spacing cabinets a little off the walls can often eliminate the need for fillers, plus it gives you deeper counters.

I just got an email today from thecabinetjoint.com announcing a new line of assembled cabinets at 20% off. They sell Conestoga cabinets and I seem to recall a number of good reviews on them when I was researching my kitchen. I did get a quote on their RTA Conestoga cabinets for my laundry room but ended up with Ikea. They were however very prompt with their estimate.

Thank you all for your advice. We live 2 hours from an Ikea so I think we may head to Orlando to look at both cabinets and appliance options.

We are planning to do all of our labor ourselves. Husband and my father are extremely handy so I know we can save money there. If I can get our cabinet costs in at the $7K range, I can afford granite, the appliances I want and hardwood floors. My budget line items are: Cabinets- $7k; Granite $3k; Hardwoods- $5k (entire first floor); Appliances $6k; hardware, faucet, sink, lighting- $1.5k Is this realistic?

I have been struggling to find local custom cabinet makers in our area...any suggestions on how to find them? I live in a newer community and no one seems to have any referrals.

We are planning to do a kitchen layout this weekend and I will post for feeback and thoughts.

Mobydog -- you don't have your email option turned on so I can't message you. But if you click on my name and send me an email I can write to you. Thanks.

You can mix and match in a lot ways. As suggested above you could mix a couple of custom boxes if using Ikea with custom doors. Drawer bases are where you see the big Ikea price advantage so you can always do the lowers with Ikea and something else with the uppers (uppers often being much less expensive). If your doing it yourself it doesn't cost much to order Fastcap PVC edge banding (and a couple of tools) and apply it to match the doors before you assemble the cabinets.

After multiple quotes from different cabinet makers (including local custom), we ordered from Conestoga. We're very pleased! If you're handy, you should quickly get the knack of assembling. We could custom design our drawer heights and cabinet widths and bought cabinets for three rooms (kitchen perimeter plus island, mud room, and big pantry), for what we would have paid for Dynasty cabinets, for just the kitchen and island. Kraftmaid surprisingly wasn't too far from Dynasty. They do not offer the RTA cabinets in all of their colortone finishes but we ordered multiple door samples in different finishes. Their doors and drawer fronts and woodworking is GORGEOUS. There are lots of PDFs out there at various websites for their products--get a feel for the door styles.

At our local woodworking shop (which came in at the higher end for quotes BTW), they displayed Conestoga doors on their walls, for customers who wanted doors they couldn't make in house.

Whatever you choose, get door samples in the colors and styles you like and live with them for a while.

I used Conestoga for my RTA cabinets. I even did the finishing myself. I'm sure that I could have procured some kind of finished cabinet for the same money, but nowhere close to the same features and quality for 2x price.
It was a way for me to get super-high quality stuff for less money than paying Omega Dynasty prices.
And of course things only turned out as well as they did because of my skills, tools, and sweat equity. It would be easy to fall into a "cheaper outlay equals a lower cost project" trap. The assembly and especially finishing processes are time sucks and energy drains.

Casey

If you have any questions about customizing Ikea cabs to get different sizes or configurations, the ikeafans website is a great resource. They have some great people there who can walk you through just about anything....

Mobydog - Could you slash your appliance budget in half by keeping old appliances that are still good and only replacing whats absolutely necessary? Or buy some entry level appliances? I do not know the standard allocations for costs in budgeting a kitchen, but $6k for appliances seems high compared to the amounts you plan to spend on cabinets and floors.

$6000 for appliances is about what we plan to spend:

$1800 for Samsung french door refrigerator
$1000 for Bosch DW
$2200 for Bosch slide-in range
$ 500 for Zephyr range hood
$ 350 for tax
====
$5850

I wouldn't want to skimp on appliances - you use them way too much.

You may be able to slash some of the costs if you shop sales and clearances for the appliances. We did not pay retail and ended up with better options than we would have accepted. It took some careful looking and shopping, but it is doable.

ITA about shopping sales! Best Buy & Lowes both have a Samsung French-door fridge listed in their black friday (day after Thanksgiving) ads...Best Buy's is $1200 and Lowes' is $1600, I believe. The one at Lowes is marked down already, I bought a Whirlpool last weekend for $1200.
Last year at Valentine's day, Lowes had Bosch dishwashers on sale, I got mine for $650.
And check Sears Outlet website, I haven't looked for ranges, but found a $3000 Electrolux double wall oven marked down to $900, it's sitting in my garage right now... so there ARE plenty of deals to be had!! :)

This is my first post, I'm generally just a lurker. We weren't planning on a kitchen remodel for another two years or so. I was at HD last Nov. and started talking to the KD about how much I liked the KM kitchen display. She said that she had just sold it. I asked if it was at quite a discount. She said it was about 1/3rd of the original price. I called HD's within a 6 hour radius and found the KM display at a HD in Iowa. They were willing to sell it to me. I spent many hour measuring the display at our HD and talking to the KD in Iowa. I found a way to get the display to work in our kitchen. I'm trying to figure out a way to post pics of my kitchen. Total cost around 8 K which included cream cabs, silestone, ss sink, crackle subway tile backsplash, and Ikea BB, and install by carpenter. This time of year is the time they sell displays. So if you find one you're interested in you may want to ask if it's being changed out and if you can purchase. Hope to post pics soon.

Husband and I did DIY with Conestoga RTA cabinets as well.
We are very happy! Conestoga has been making doors for many of the high-end kitchen cabinet makers forever. Quality wise they are nicer than the Medallion cabinets we were looking at (and I liked the Medallion finishes). The cost was less than half of the Medallion estimate. My medallion estimate had different colors and different glass doors and partical board boxes. My conestoga's are all wood.

For those of you with Conestoga RTAs....what website did you use? Seems like a number of vendors carry them when I googled "Conestoga RTA".

So many people like Ikea cabinets but want Shaker white doors. You'd think they could come up with this style by now.A couple of designs are close but not quite close enough.

We looked at Ikea and were ready to go. The problem was we are not handy enough to assemble and install. The Ikea boxes have to be opened and checked within a short time of delivery. If you wait too long and something is missing, you have to order it and pay. We wouldn't know if some screw or gizmo wasn't there. There are Ikea assembly and install people advertising. They wanted $149 per cabinet, large or small. So I guess Ikea works great if you are a good do it yourself person, but wouldn't work for those of us who can't.

New to posting here, have lurked on and off for 6 months or so. Just finishing off our complete DIY kitchen remodel. We are in Ohio, and only about a 3 hour drive from the Kraftmade outlet store in Warren, Ohio. If you are motivated and handy, this is the place to purchase your cabinets. It can be found online, and cabinetwarehouseoutlet.com is a helpful tool to guide you along. You have to be somewhat flexible, and able to act quickly, after doing your homework. Our set would have been 20K minimum from Lowe's, and we have maybe 6K wrapped up in them. Will try to post pics, being new here, haven't figured that out yet. Our granite comes Friday, this will finish off our 6 months long project. YEA!!!

Hi, a couple things to know about Conestoga...it's not cheap. Conestoga should be in between a price of kraftmaid and Ikea. If you were looking at much higher quality cabinetry the price will be less than half of that estimate with the same high quality (if assembled correctly). The Conestoga cabinets are not hard to assemble but it is a LOT of work. When the big truck comes with your delivery, the bulk will scare and overwhelm you at first. Besides saving a bit you really need to ask yourself if you want all this extra work because if you look around enough you could get a lesser quality for two or three grand more that might work for you and that's already assembled.
Our decision to go Conestoga RTA was based on money savings without sacrificing quality, plus the fact that Conestoga had endless paint, stain, and door choices ect And that wood cabinets are slightly lighter to hang for the 50 ish DIYers . I think most the people on here that have used Conestoga have gone through different venders; I went with cabintmakeschoice and was very happy. The cabinets are made in the U.S.A and they have a few plants throughout the U.S.

Hi,
I used "Cabinetmaker's Choice" for Conestoga. I am only about 75 miles from the plant, so they didn't even charge freight.
Casey

Here is a link that might be useful: Cabinetmaker's Choice

Casey, you should show your beautiful kitchen and how nice they can look by doing the finish yourself, if one wanted to really save and buy unfinished as well as unassembled.