Just wondering if anybody uses the Kraft Maid cabinets from home depot, likes/dislikes.
If not, what do you do for cabinets in your kitchens?
If we ABSOLUTELY MUST change the cabinets, we use cabinets from Lowes. We have had no problems with them (except the tenants doing their best to destroy them).
Mike
I was going to have Home Depot design the kitchen, sell me the cabinets, and install them with their contractors.
I gone as far as having the design done, and a service to come and measure the place. Then, after three trips to the store, sat and waited two hours each time for staff to show up to take my order, I gave up.
I thought my experience was unique till I visited a website called “HomeDepotSucks”, or something.
A nice fella in the appliance department next store was good enough to page for assistance, but none showed up, for hours. We tried to get store management, but they were off at some management meeting each time.
In this business, time is money, I was delayed almost a week and can’t even order cabinets, so I had to look elsewhere.
For the small rental kitchen I had, I visited a small local kitchen cabinet factory, and had them custom make the cabinets from the Home Depot design, for less than $1,000 more, and the cabinets are made entirely of oak, rather than the artificial “compress stuff” of the Home Depot variety. I don’t recall if Home Depot offered real oak.
Also, based on the delivery schedule, they were able to get the cabinets faster than the delivery promised by Home Depot, and also delivered “assembled”. I recall the Home Depot stuff had to be assembled, which contractors will charge me extra to put together.
I decided to “tenant proof” kitchens since I experienced careless tenants damaging the cheaper particle board stuff. With cabinets made of real wood, at least it could be repaired, and not disintegrate when wet. I also asked the contractor to raise the cabinets 1/4 inch off the floors with wood scraps so if a ktichen floods due to careless tenants, at least the cabinets won’t be damaged.
For the next kitchen, an immigrant retired contractor was referred to me. I showed him this kitchen, with real oak cabinets, and told him I wanted a kitchen done exactly like this. He did the entire new kitchen including materials, i.e oak cabinets, tiled the walls instead of having formica back splashes, completely installed for $5,000. He even put in several hi-hat lights that I had to go buy the fixtures, and hired electricians the time before, costing me hundreds of dollars extra.
I asked him where he got the oak cabinets so cheap, and he smiled and said that he found a supplier that imports them from China, and left it at that.
Home Depot is for strokers.
Go to your local professional (there is a difference) lumber yard.
These guy’s are excellent, know their products,know where they can save you time and money and will deliver everything to your site on time and in one piece. The yard I deal with has a guy who just deals in kitchens, you give him the dimensions of the room or he’ll come out. Great resource and they work harder to please their customers because they know most people just go to Home Cheapo. Remember your Home Depot kitchen designer was making slurpees 3 months ago. The guy in the lumber yard just got too old to be banging nails and that experience is priceless.
I also had a great experience with Lowe’s lower priced maple cabinets. I used their cabinets then asked for a few of the installers phone numbers. They tell you they can’t give out the numbers but they will. By using the installer directly I paid less then 50% of Lowe’s quoted installation price… and got a 10% off coupon on ebay to save even more.
Jeff