Your kitchen’s aesthetic should match the decor of your house to accentuate its overall beauty. And cabinets are an integral part of your kitchen to provide adequate storage yet look appealing. But before you start making your new kitchen cabinet purchase, you must learn about the variety of options the market presents.
Kitchen cabinets come in an array of different types, styles, and pricing options. Finding the right kitchen cabinet for your house starts with identifying your goals and priorities. Here are some ways to get started:
Essential Considerations to Keep in Mind
1. Your Future Plan
The kitchen cabinet market contains an extensive range of styling options. And if you want to add to your house’s value, you must keep yourself up-to-date with the market’s latest trends—especially the ones used in your neighborhood. What you need to ask yourself is, ‘how long do I plan to stay here?’ Figure out whether your residence is a rental, a resale, or someplace you plan on staying forever. Your time staying over can influence your options.
2. Knowing What to Look for
It focuses on areas you want to revamp for enhanced functionality and aesthetics. But it majorly depends on your kitchen’s current look and your budget. If you’re looking to refresh the area without any significant overhauls, a fresh coat of paint can do wonders to your kitchen. Or if your door faces have suffered wear and tear, you can replace them. On the flip hand, if you’re renovating your kitchen from scratch, it’s best to install new, sturdier kitchen cabinets.
3. Your Kitchen’s Layout
Designing the outlook of your kitchen cabinets can be a challenging task. You want to ensure it blends in with the current kitchen layout so that the rest of the components are not disturbed or look out of place. It’s always an excellent idea to start with an accurate scaled floor plan of your kitchen and its architectural dimensions. Moreover, you should include the location of present utilities like electricity, water, and sewer connections. Other factors to consider, include heating units, cook-top ventilation, electrical outlets, and gas piping. Moreover, consider your appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, range, microwave, dispenser, and sinks.
4. Making a Rough Sketch
Now that you’ve factored in all the essential things, it’s time to decide on the kitchen outlay. You may want to reposition the appliances and add a few more cabinets for some extra space. After that, you may want to pick up a color palette. You can choose contrasting hues such as yellows, black and white, or go for monochromatic range. Next, you should draw out the cabinet placement, task centers, and other critical spaces. Selecting a kitchen layout will help you determine the correlation of different elements in the kitchen. It’s recommended you get an architect, interior designer, kitchen designer, or cabinet designer to design the layout while ensuring accurate cabinetry dimensions efficiently.
Buyer’s Guide
While those were primary things to ask yourself, here are some other things to keep in mind when making your purchase:
Selecting a Cabinet Type
Cabinets come in three levels; stock, semi-custom, and custom cabinets. Typically, stock cabinets come in standard sizes and are fully assembled. You can pick up these cabinets in a day, but your options are often limited. Semi-custom cabinets are according to the specifications you order. It means you get a wide variety of sizes and styles. An advantage of these is that you can rest assured they’ll fit your cabinetry. However, they take longer to deliver and are costly. Lastly, custom cabinets are available in almost every size you require. If you’re looking for a unique or irregular-shaped cabinet, custom cabinets are the best option. Not just this, but you can select the style, overlay, and finishes as well. These are the most expensive, although the price and time taken vary on your cabinet specifications.
Look into the Material
The material of your cabinet construction has a significant impact on what your cabinet will look like. Typically, you get broader types of materials in semi-custom and custom cabinets. You’ll find that solid wood drawers, full-extension drawer guides, dovetail joinery, integrated rails, and solid wood doors with a solid wood or plywood panel form more sustainable cabinetry. While stapled particleboard, in integrated rail, veneered particle boards or a medium-density fiberboard panel break down faster.
Choosing a Style
Cabinets come in two different styles: framed or frameless. The former refers to a cabinet containing a box and face frame. It has attached doors and drawers. Moreover, the frame extends about 2 inches over your cabinet’s opening. The second one does not have the skip and face frame, which means doors and drawers are attached directly to the cabinet box. It allows for easier access and looks classier. These are thicker than framed cabinets and are more spacious.
Picking an Overlay
The overlay of your cabinet refers to how the cabinet door covers the cabinet. These come in; partial, full, and insert doors. A partial overlay offers depth to the cabinet by covering an inch of the cabinet’s face and is popularly used in framed cabinets. A full overlay, on the other hand, is mostly used in frameless cabinets. But you can install it on your framed construction too. In these, the cabinet has covered edges. Lastly, attach the cabinet to your framed construction. Here the doors secure the inner surface while revealing most of the cabinet’s face.
Necessary Features
The features of your cabinets mostly depend on your needs. You can choose a pullout trash can, built-in charging station. Moreover, you can get pullout, pull-down, and pull-up shelves and drawers for easy access to cutlery. Adjustable countertops allow you to switch the cabinet to the ideal height, whereas elevated toe kicks offer a comfortable fit for wheelchairs. Going for lowered cabinets for microwaves and wall ovens put hot food at an optimum height, while a raised dishwasher makes doing chores manageable.
Accessorize it!
To further beautify your cabinets, you can accessorize it with fascinating glass doors. Choose a contrasting, incredible design for your interior to complete the look. Down-lit glass display shelves and plate holders are two other ways you can divert the focus to your stylish cabinets. Another great way to enhance your kitchen’s look is by adding faux furniture legs to the cabinets.
Where to Install?
Knowing where to install your cabinet can help narrow down your options. Depending on the construction and style you chose, you can pick either base, sink, or corner cabinets. Corner cabinets come in a myriad of different designs to ensure your kitchen’s aesthetic isn’t disturbed. Sink cabinets have doors leading to under-sink storage. Lastly, base cabinets offer you a large workspace by being placed underneath your countertops.
Set a Budget
Setting up your budget before making a purchase lets you find the best and perfect cabinet. Typically, stock cabinets are the least expensive. Semi-custom cabinets are comparatively more expensive than stock cabinets but less than custom cabinets. A custom cabinet’s exact price depends on the overlay, material, construction, and additional specifications.