Let’s chat about our process of ordering all of our kitchen cabinets from Lowes. I am going to share the pros and the cons, cost, and of course lots of photos!!
When we purchased our new home we were deciding between custom cabinets from a local cabinet builder or ordering somewhere like Lowes. We decided that ordering through Lowes may save us a little money so we stopped in one day just to browse their options.
They have a ton of cabinet door styles and colors hanging on the wall in their kitchen design center. We chatted with one of the designers and took a few brochures home to browse.
I will preface this blog post with the fact that my friend Meagan, who is an interior designer, helped me with the majority of figuring out my exact kitchen layout and design. I am not sure what the process would be like if you were trying to figure it out just with the Lowes designer. If I am being honest, I don’t know that they are qualified enough to actually design. They just know how to plug measurements into their program and do different layouts for your space.
We decided to move forward with Lowes after chatting with my friend Meagan and coming up with a design I liked. It was just a matter of ordering the right cabinets to fit the design.
We will talk about cost towards the end of this post, but Lowes offers different lines of cabinets that vary in quality. We decided to order the majority of our cabinets from the kraftmaid brand. Mostly because I liked one of their door styles, the Cayden.
We worked with a designer at Lowes to get everything ordered down to crown molding, island legs, quarter round and more! It was time consuming and I was worried that we would miss something or something would come in wrong. Spoiler alert I was right!
We chose to order cabinets through Lowes but install them ourselves to save a little money. I think this is why we ran into some issues. If a Lowes contractor is the one that installs your cabinets and anything is wrong with the order they will just fix it!
So lets just break it down:
PROS:
semi quick turnaround time
more affordable than a custom cabinet builder
they arrive painted the color of your choice
CONS:
quality is not the same as custom
some items may be missed during the ordering process
My one tip if you decide to order cabinets through Lowes is to make sure you upgrade your cabinet boxes to full plywood. This was something we were really strict about having… and guess what? They somehow missed that when the order went through.
So the one thing we are not super happy with about our cabinets is that they are not solid wood. Cabinets that have the full plywood boxes are sturdier and more durable and overall better quality! Spend some time to read over and make sure they have this in your order if this is an upgrade that you want!
COST
We didn’t get a quote from a custom cabinet builder because we needed our cabinets ordered ASAP. I would imagine it would have been at least $10-15k more than what we spent.
This is what we bought for our kitchen: upper and lower cabinets, island cabinets (with tons of drawers), island legs, quarter round, crown molding, crown molding spacers, island feet, walk through pantry cabinet, and two upper cabinets we ordered and ended up putting in our laundry room. Our ceilings are 10ft so our cabinets are extra tall and we added smaller cabinets to the tops of them for added height.
TOTAL COST: $22,000
COLOR AND STYLE
We chose Kraftmaid brand Cayden door style in the color Dove white! We got the tapered island legs from Kraftmaid as well and 4″ crown molding.
You will have to stay tuned for a full kitchen reveal post! We are ALMOST DONE! Just waiting on appliances and finishing up few small details!
Tap HERE to read about our soapstone countertops!