4 Tips For Choosing The Right Kitchen Cabinets
How to Choose Kitchen Cabinets?
When you’re in the middle of designing a new kitchen, choosing the right style of cabinets can be daunting. There are SO many different styles, colors, and materials to choose from. Do you get modern cabinets and risk being unfashionable in a few years, or do you go with traditional cabinets that could make your house look dated?
1. Decide Whether You're Going Custom or Prefabricated
If you’ve got the budget to spend, custom cabinets are a great way to go. A professional kitchen design firm will take a blueprint of your space and figure out all the best ways to maximize the storage, style, and efficiency of your new kitchen cabinets.
You can get corner cabinets shaped perfectly to your walls, pull-out drawers that slot perfectly into the most convenient places, appliance garages nestled just where you’d want them – the options are limitless when you have custom cabinets. You can really build the perfect kitchen for the way you personally cook.
Don’t settle for generic cabinets for the kitchen – they should appeal to you!
Of course, the downside is that custom cabinets and kitchen design is very expensive. On average, you’re looking at around $500 per linear foot for well-made bespoke custom cabinets. On the other hand, stock cabinets start at around $70 per linear foot, so you can easily get a lot more bang for your buck even if they’re not tailor-made.
Ultimately, it all depends on you, your budget, and your needs. If you’re unsure, you could try semi-custom cabinets, whose price range falls in the middle. These semi-custom designs use stock inset doors styles and colors but they can be tailor-made to fit your kitchen more specifically.
2. Think About How You Want Your Kitchen to be Organized
If you’re a bit of an organization junkie, then kitchen remodeling can really satisfy your inner control freak! There are so many unique ways to make your kitchen more organized and tailored to the way that you like to store your appliances, utensils, and food.
For instance, utensil dividers are an easy way to keep baking tools away from knives or keep meat-roasting thermometers separate from frying tools. If you have different types of kitchen utensils for many different types of cooking, separating these tools is a great way to keep you organized mid-bake.
No one wants to go searching for kitchen tools halfway through cooking!
Use a lot of spices? Consider a dedicated spice rack to keep all your seasonings in one place. Need to dispose of garbage easily? Try a pull-out trash can that stays hidden and keeps nasty smells concealed. You really can customize your kitchen to match your cooking style and keep everything in its place.
One of our favorite organization tools for modern kitchens is the appliance garage. These pull-up cabinets sit on top of your countertop, hiding all your commonly used appliances (blenders, toasters, etc.) when they’re not in use. It’s a great way to instill minimalism and tidiness in your cooking space, especially when you’re not using it to cook. Perfect for a classy kitchen remodel!
3. Decide Whether You Want Kitchen Drawers or Cabinets
Choosing kitchen cabinets' designs is one thing, but have you considered kitchen drawers? In old-school kitchens, you could expect a ton of dark wooden cabinets, but in more modern styles, we’re seeing a lot of glossy drawers instead. A lot of people have a combination of both drawers and cabinets depending on their aesthetic and needs.
As mentioned earlier, kitchen drawers are great for maximizing your storage and enhancing your organization – it’s a lot easier to use things like utensil dividers and panty pull-outs when you’re working with a drawer-based kitchen. But of course there’s a drawback (no pun intended):
Drawers are more expensive than cabinets.
While cabinets may have a shelf or two inside, drawers require sliding mechanisms that are fragile, prone to breaking more easily, and more expensive to initially install. So while drawers are better on the whole, there’s a lot more hassle to deal with.
Conversely, if your space is quite large and storage space isn’t an issue for you, kitchen cabinets have a timeless aesthetic that can add a quirky pop to your home without costing a fortune or giving you lots of maintenance problems. They’re also much easier to clean and wall cabinets make use of additional space.
4. Decide Upon a Cohesive Color Story
Your kitchen’s color story must be cohesive, even if it’s a simple one. Your color story is basically the color palette of your kitchen and how all of the hues marry together to make the space feel warm, comfortable, spacious, and stylish. Nobody wants a kitchen that’s all one color – it’s boring and lacks dimension.
We're after style here!
For example, if you’ve got a light beige floor and taupe walls, then matte black cabinet doors add that accent of darkness that you need to break up all that light. On the other hand, if you’ve got a solid wood flooring with duck egg blue walls, some off-white wood cabinets with black fittings pop as a feature of the room.
Take the opportunity to make your cabinet doors a feature of the room!
If you’re working with interior designers or kitchen designers, then make sure to talk to them about, especially if they’ve got a color palette to style in mind. While cabinets are practical for storage, they hit the eye sooner than your walls, countertops, or flooring, so it’s essentially to get that balance of colors just right.
