How to Choose Kitchen Cabinets for Your Style and Budget

Someone recently asked me how our budget-friendly, online-ordered kitchen cabinets are holding up and since we just passed the one-year anniversary of our DIY kitchen remodel, now seems like the perfect time to chat about how to choose kitchen cabinets.

When I tell you I’m a researcher, it means before I dive into most bigger projects, I spend countless hours pricing things out, saving inspo, watching YouTube videos on the technical details, and comparing the options to make sure we’re doing things right and, also importantly, on budget. Our huge kitchen remodel was no different, and while we chose to go with premade and prepainted cabinets, I took meticulous notes on each of the options (eldest daughter energy amiright).

There’s a whole spectrum on what’s available from fully custom to basically build-it-yourself, and obviously each comes at a different price point and time/skill investment. So, if you’re eyeing a DIY kitchen renovation any time soon, this is a good starting point in your planning!

RTA Cabinets

RTA means Ready To Assemble. Essentially, these are like an upscale version of flatpack furniture where you’d get the cabinets in a box and assemble them yourselves with some wood glue/nails/screws and a set of instructions.

I’ve seen them both pre-finished with paint and sealer and unfinished. IKEA kitchen cabinets are an example of this style, and are so popular there are entire companies (like Semihandmade) that have launched to offer custom new doors for IKEA kitchens.

Pros:

• Can be more affordable than already assembled options
• Less bulky to have delivered and store away until you use them
• Often many configurations of cabinet types & sizes

Cons:

• More time consuming
• More room for error if you’re not as confident in carpentry-type projects

Unfinished Cabinets

These are – just like they sound – cabinets that are raw wood. You need to finish and paint them yourself which does give a lot of flexibility and a custom look in your finish, but can also then add on a lot more labor time and tools to the job.

Pros:

• Fully customizable finish whether that’s stain or paint color
• More on the affordable end price-wise (though that depends on whether you go for assembled or RTA unfinished cabinets)
• Likely a shorter lead time on delivery because it doesn’t need to go through that finishing process

Cons:

• Much more time- and labor-intensive
• Will require more tools to paint/stain and get the correct finish
• Leaves some room for a less-professional finish depending on your comfort level in finishing cabinets yourself (painting cabinets can be tricky!)

Custom Cabinetry

Many of the online kitchen cabinet stores that sell RTA or unfinished cabinets will offer a design service and have someone work with you to understand the setup you need, but you could also go a step further and have cabinets custom-built for the space. Obviously, based on the name, this would give the most custom look, and can be a good option if you’ve got a really specific vision you want to achieve.

Pros:

• A good option if you’ve got an odd-shaped or other quirky kind of space
• A unique finished space
• A time-saver with very little time and labor commitment as the homeowner

Cons:

• Likely a longer lead time to be delivered
• The most expensive option in most cases
• Not really DIY-friendly as custom builders will probably want to also install their products themselves

Pre-assembled, Pre-painted Cabinets

This is the option we ultimately went with and I’m so happy with our choice. We used cabinets.com and ours are in the color ‘iron’.

This post isn’t sponsored at all, but I loved their kitchen design tool that I thought gave a really realistic view on how it would look and that used their actual products so that once I got everything in place how I wanted it, I could just use that list of cabinets and enter in the order to my cart to price it all out.

Pros:

• Time-saver not needing to assemble or paint cabinets
• Fairly mid-range on the price

Cons:

• More limited on colors and paint finishes
• Requires more space to store the cabinets before install (if that’s a consideration)

More About Our DIY Kitchen Remodel

Our kitchen cabinets came to a total of about $6,000. I had ordered samples from the site before fully committing so I could see the colors and quality and was happy with those, so we went ahead and booked during a big sale they were having.

Knowing we were doing the kitchen fully DIY (AKA demo, subfloor, tiling, cabinets, backsplash, range hood, ceilings, everything), taking assembling and painting the cabinets off the list was a huge time saver. Also, I rightly assumed that by the time we got to the point of installing cabinets we’d be begging for a functional kitchen back (did I mention we had a four-month-old and a 2-year-old at the time?), so for us that extra cost was worth it just to have them ready to go once they got to the house.

We ordered the cabinets before we even started the demo because of the lead time of around six weeks, so being able to measure and visualize the cabinets is a really important part of the process.

Ultimately, figuring out how to choose kitchen cabinets for a DIY Kitchen Remodel requires a ton of different considerations. It’s like a Venn diagram situation between time, money, skill level, and vision, but hopefully laying out all these options is a good starting point if you’ve got a reno coming up!

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