Cabinets: Purchased!

I first posted about getting ready to renovate our kitchen back in September of 2018. At the time, I noted we had the basic plan in place for the layout of the room, but we were a bit daunted by how big of a project this was going to be. It might take a year to really get ready for it. (Ha ha ha.) In November of 2019, I wrote about how I was finally getting ready to move forward with cabinet selection and purchase. (Ha ha ha.) I had found an online cabinet company that would send us Ready To Assemble (RTA) cabinets, and it seemed like that would be cheaper than going with buying cabinets pre-made. In July 2020, I wrote about still gearing up for those renovations, and maybe looking at that fall to do them. (Ha ha ha.) I could have sworn I wrote a post in September or so, talking about how Denisa and I went to Lowe’s to do a consultation around cabinets, but I can’t find it now. We’d talked to friends who swore that would be cheaper and easier than RTA, and the consultation was free, so . . .

Yesterday, we finally ordered and paid for the cabinets. We did end up getting them from Lowe’s instead of the online company I’d found. Why? For one thing, they were less expensive. I’m not surprised it was hard for me to tell that at first. Figuring out just how expensive cabinets will be from Lowe’s is a bewildering process. It’s hard to find the prices anywhere, and when I’d guesstimated the cost, I hadn’t realized that Lowe’s discounts their cabinets. Heavily. So the price you see on the surface ends up being much less than the price you pay.

For example, our cabinets ended up being 40% off the final price, plus 50% off the stain we chose. Lowe’s was running a 30% off sale (that seems to be pretty much permanent, judging from the fact that every time I checked on the price over the last year, the sale was always running). We got that extra 10% off by applying for a Lowe’s credit card, which typically gives you 5% off at Lowe’s, but for cabinets this week, they were doubling that.

So the Lowe’s cabinets are less expensive, they’re the same quality as what I was looking at online in terms of construction, they’ll arrive pre-assembled, and I don’t have to worry about them anymore. I also had someone who actually knew what they were talking about help me design the layout. Maxwell was our assistant at the Augusta Lowe’s, and I was very happy with the help he gave us and how patient and courteous he was. That made a complicated process that much easier to handle. (All told, I think we spent 8 hours in that store over three different visits, picking out wood types, stains, layout, features, and all.)

For the record, we went with rustic alder for the wood choice, with a stain that will make it slightly darker and give it a matte finish. Our current kitchen has 7 drawers and basically 8 cabinets. The new one will have something like 13 drawers and 14 cabinets. It’s hard to match it up one to one, but we’re going to have many more storage options. I was worried the increased cost of lumber right now would have made them more expensive, but apparently that isn’t the case. The lead time, however, has gone from 4-8 weeks to 16 weeks, which might have been a problem if we were planning to do this soon, but we’re not going to start until August, so it’s not nearly as big of a deal.

At this point, the cabinet’s are ordered, the fridge is here, the dishwasher’s here . . . Let’s put it this way: if we don’t renovate the kitchen this fall, we’re going to have an awful lot of boxes around the house for way too long.

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