Kitchen Renovation- Homeowners True Story

By Author: Jason Delmar
Total Articles: 335
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After remodeling most of my house, it was now time to tackle the kitchen and dining area. I have darker color cabinets; that look like something out of the 1970's. The cabinets come up to a wall that acts as a divider from the eating area. It only extends out as far as the base cabinet. With the limited selection of paneling styles, I was unable to find a darker paneling to match the cabinets. After weeks of searching I was attracted to a pecan wainscot that could go beneath the cabinet wall divider; the problem is that it did not match my existing darker cabinets. The biggest challenge that I was struggling with was how to bridge the color difference where the dark and light colors met. The pecan had a modern flair to it, with a slight distressed look that came through in dark lines that were sparsely spread throughout the pattern. It was a great new look and at this point I had a big decision to make.

While it was going to completely blow my budget, I decided to go for new kitchen cabinets, but was afraid of the high prices that come with this home improvement product. I had shopped around and was surprised ...
... at how much you can spend on kitchen cabinets. After searching all the local kitchen distributors and the big home improvement stores, I thought I would continue my search online. I had my dream paneling and now I needed a kitchen cabinet that would match and that was not going to cost five thousand dollars. I was amazed by the selection online, but it literally took me hours to sort through all of the websites claiming to be cabinet manufacturers and distributors. It seemed like every website I checked wanted me to e-mail them my dimensions and they would have someone call me with a quote (all I wanted to know was how much it might cost). My neighbor told me about RTA cabinets, so I decided to do a google search for them. I was surprised to find out that these cabinets are less expensive and in some cases a better quality than pre assembled cabinets.

What I found astounded me. There is another world of kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities out there. I quickly breezed through numerous websites and found a wide range of styles. After I checked a few sites I came back to one of the first ones on the search. It was easily the best pricing, but more exciting was the fact that it had this type of cabinet called Windsor. It is a standard name, but it was the match I was looking for. This Windsor cabinet had the stressed dark lines, the nicely tanned wood, and most of all -- the modern look that my kitchen needed. The first thing that I noticed was that there is a huge variance in prices from site to site. So please note, check the sites and the gimmicks some of these sites try to pull, a good site will give you shipping and all other information up front.

In the end I got rid of the dark old cabinets, achieved a modern look, and because of RTA cabinets, I saved roughly 35% off of retail cabinets. So when looking for kitchen cabinets feel free to look at your local stores, but then go online and compare RTA kitchen cabinet prices. It is a big difference in price and quality, but it is a difference that is in your favor.