Choosing Cabinets Requires Self-Education
Recommendations work well when choosing a contractor, so do they work equally well when it comes to choosing a line of cabinets?
This from a leading consumer advocacy and testing website:
Readers who chose cabinets based solely on the advice of contractors, designers, or architects were twice as likely to report a problem as those more involved.
There’s an important difference between choosing contractors and choosing cabinets. Cabinets are a known quantity that can be objectively measured against other cabinets, so there’s definitely a place for testing agencies in this process.
One shortcoming of the testing agency, though, is that they aren’t actually putting the cabinets on the wall. I can tell you from experience that some cabinet lines have faults that no testing agency is aware of.
So, if you wanted the opinion of someone who really knows about the cabinets, skip the designers and architects and ask a kitchen cabinet installer.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:27 pm
What sort of faults would not be noticed by a testing agency?
….And the obvious question is, what cabinet lines do you recommend?
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Martie: it’s a long list. I should do a couple of blog posts on it.
I’ve seen factory cabinets out-of-square, no glue in the joints, given a finish that flaked off under gentle pressure or began to break down under normal household cleaners, the list goes on and on.
Typically in an inflationary recession like we’re having now, all companies will be under extreme pressure to reduce costs. (The alternative is raising prices which often results in quick loss of customers.) So consumers need to be very much on guard against cheapened materials and/or methods in an industry like cabinets.
Kraftmaid and Bertch are big players who tend to be high on quality historically.