Thinking Inside, Outside and All Around the Box

For reasons I will get to shortly, cabinetry is on my mind today. It’s a key element to most residential projects and one that can be difficult to navigate.  Cabinetry is incredibly simple in its components, but executing a design properly can be more complex than people tend to realize.  We are really just talking about boxes, here.  If you’ve ever put together a piece of IKEA cabinetry, you know this first hand.  There are strong boxes and weak boxes.  I could ramble on about the difference between the two, but that’s really a separate topic from the issue at hand.  Suffice to say, I encourage my clients to go with plywood boxes with durable, high quality joints.

Now for the issue that has brought me to my keyboard today, the choice between custom and semi-custom cabinetry.  Let’s look at a comparison of two kitchens that I designed last year.  Project A decided to go with a local custom cabinetry shop and Project B through a cabinetry showroom in San Francisco that sells semi-custom cabinetry, shipped from a factory in Texas.  

Both involved a mix of two finishes. Project A is a modern combination of walnut plywood and pearl laminate slab faces.  Project B is a shaker style mix of cherry and painted cabinetry.  Both projects came out beautifully, but the roads to this end could not have been more different.

Project A followed a production process with which I am very familiar.   I was in contact with the cabinetmaker regularly.  He redrew my design, taking into consideration clearances that he would need for installation.  We checked and rechecked conditions and details before the cabinets were made.  They took a little longer to build than expected, but even that is not unusual for a project of this type.

I had never worked with a cabinet showroom before Project B.  This one provided a reasonable price and assured me that they would handle all cabinet-related issues.  I am usually responsible for checking the shop drawings that I mentioned above.  In this case, the showroom representative took over that responsibility.  In theory, the arrangement would require less of my time and I could pass that savings on to my client.  In reality, every shipment that we received from this company was faulty and had to be corrected by a local carpenter.  Even the shipments sent to correct previous shipments were wrong.  The company did take responsibility for all of its mistakes, but the cabinets were just finished today, nearly SIX MONTHS later, and I spent loads of time trying to correct their mistakes in the least wasteful way possible.  

In the end, a local cabinet source makes the most sense on so many levels.  Aside from quality control and accountability, there are a lot of economic and environmental benefits to supporting our local cabinetmakers. (For anyone interested, the cabinets in Project A were made by Kirby Cabinetry in Berkeley, California.)