Cabinetry 101

Our Coastal Farmhouse kitchen Our laundry cabinets We don’t have many regrets about our Coastal Farmhouse build, but one of our biggest is our cabinetry. During the planning phase I asked around town for cabinet shop recommendations. I had one particular cabinet builder’s name come up multiple times and several acquaintances raved about his work. Even so, I went ahead and interviewed four different local shops before finalizing the decision. It was basically one high end, semi-custom cabinet maker, two semi-custom, high volume cabinet builders, and one fully custom cabinet builder (the one multiple folks had recommended). There was a $30k range in the pricing I received for our complete cabinet package. Two shops provided me with renderings, two didn’t (they just provided me a written description). The custom builder had given me penciled drawings and what I was so impressed with was that everything was symmetrical and there were no “half cabinets.” For some reason, I was pretty hung up on this idea of not wanting any “half cabinets.” He even was currently building another kitchen and he invited me to the shop to see the beautiful custom hood he was building for another client. He was a good salesman and we finally agreed on a price and due date and put down our deposit for fully custom cabinetry with fun details and symmetry throughout! from pinterest I’ll spare you all the dirty details, but due to Hurricane Michael complications and this man’s personal issues at home, he got months and months behind, holding up our construction. He was basically a one man shop and did not have near enough help for the jobs he was taking on. In the meantime, I was nauseous and dealing with first trimester ???? as I found out I was pregnant. Somewhere in that blur of a time, Matt called me and said that the cabinet builder wasn’t going to be able to provide us the custom hood in our contract and wanted me to pick one out of his catalog. (I was so sick that I still don’t have any recollection of this but Matt swears it happened. ????????‍♀️) Months later when our cabinets were finally installed, I immediately called Matt and said, “This is NOT the hood we agreed on.” Matt politely informed me that changes had been made when I was ???? and that there was no going back at this point (if we wanted to move forward and get into the house timely- and we had already moved 4 times in this process). from pinterest side note: we do have a long term plan to replace our hood with what we originally wanted, but that is another blog post. ????Sadly, when the cabinet doors were later installed I had a real gut punch moment: this was NOT the cabinet style I wanted ???????? I pulled out the contract and scanned it multiple times but it wasn’t written or specified anywhere ???? I had never even thought to double check that we were getting inset-style cabinets, I just assumed it based upon his pencil sketching. ???? What we ended up with are partial overlay style (which is typically the lowest priced option). Full overlay is the mid-grade style and inset cabinets are the higher end of the cost spectrum. It was completely my mistake, and I’