Why We Chose KraftMaid Cabinets: a house log
Last week we got the call. Our cabinets are on their way! They are arriving on Monday the 26th- which means we are at last able to schedule all the installation details. So now it is looking like we will have a kitchen before the end of the year. Glad New Year to us.
When we first walked into Home Depot eons ago (i.e. September) we knew two things about our cabinets: we hoped white and we hoped KraftMaid. White because, duh, our dream kitchen says so. KraftMaid because our friend who works for a home decorating magazine swears by them. They are close to the most pricey cabinet brand both Home Depot and Lowe’s carry, but Nancy Kulik CKD agreed wholeheartedly with our friend’s assessment. Her point was in short that you are going to spend a lot of money on cabinets no matter what, so we should spend a little bit extra to get something truly durable. In fact she even demonstrated how a child could hang on one of the open doors with no cabinet breakage- she had us at child could hang. And heck, it is what they use on Extreme Makeover Home Edition (and those people consistently look so glad). Done deal.
Initially, our mouths watered at the idea of saying “our kitchen features solid oak cabinets” until Nancy burst our bubble. If we hoped white, solid wood cabinets we’d in short be paying a 15% upcharge for KraftMaid to paint their oak cabinets. And that paint would be prone to chipping and revealing the wood grain beneath it. So, we stopped drooling and went with her suggestion – Thermofoil. It is a fancy term for a plastic coating that is baked on, making cabinets virtually wear-proof for decades. Plus it meant keeping our costs down by 15%. Now if we could simply train ourselves to drool over Thermofoil. It in fact looks simply like painted oak, so perhaps we will simply forget about the magical plastic coating in a decade or two, and simply talk about how well our painted oak cabinets are holding up.
With the brand and the finish chose, it was then down to selecting a door style. When first flipping through the options both Sherry and I immediately fell for one style called the Bel Air. We enjoyed its clean lines and slightly modern feel. But it was a little pricier than some of the other white options, so we kept looking. That is when we found an option called the Monticello. It was a bit more traditional (thicker grooves, rounder edges), a bit more ornate than the Bel Air and also a bit cheaper. And after checking seeing it look fairly good in one of their display kitchens we went with it.
Bel Air …………………………………………. Monticello
Until we changed our minds. Eventually Sherry and I admitted to each other that we were worried about the “horsiness” of the Monticello. It was not as subtle and timeless as the Bel Air. And the in-store kitchen simply looked a little bit shabby to us. When we outlined our dilemma to Nancy, she convinced us that the Bel Air would only be a few hundred dollars extra. Sold. In the scheme of a kitchen remodel, a few hundred dollars is nothing. Trust us.
So we went with our first enjoy. Monticello Out. Bel Air in.
Overall, the cabinet selection process was a bit more complicated than either of us anticipated, especially since we thought we knew exactly what we hoped going in. Let us simply hope that when our white Thermofoil KraftMaid Bel Air cabinets show up next week they are still the ideal choice. We can hardly wait.
Images courtesy of KraftMaid
