As an example of this moderate approach I give you our kitchen cabinets. They are high quality, with sturdy drawers and doors, soft-close hinges (which make a surprising difference in how I shut them), and solid-wood fronts with a beautiful factory finish. They are miles removed from the cabinets I made do with in my much bigger and more expensively-countered kitchen in our old house. And they cost about half of what we would have spent for the ones you order and then have to wait weeks for.
When we lived in Virginia in our small rambler, our kitchen was about the same size as this one. I really disliked the cabinets, as they were very cheap-looking. But whenever I’d try to figure out how much new ones would cost I’d end up with a total of about $10,000. That seemed a ludicrous amount of money for such a small space, so I’d give up. It wasn’t all that big of a deal, I figured. They were functional and brand new. In our most recent house there was the same quality of cabinets, but they were 25 years old and looked it. I did manage to replace the battered doors and drawer fronts and figure out what to do with the cabinets themselves, but if we’d stayed in that house I think we’d have decided to replace them at some point. I don’t even want to think about how much that would have cost.
For this new kitchen, though, we started from scratch. Somewhere very early in the process my father-in-law Lowell mentioned that there was a store called “Wholesale Cabinets” near us. Maybe we should take a look there. (You may remember that he’s also the one who put us onto the Floor & Decor store, another great find.) You can probably find the same basic idea in your area if you google “wholesale kitchen cabinets” or “discount kitchen cabinets.” Here’s what it boils down to: the store has a small display of cabinets, with at most half a dozen styles and finishes. These are cabinets that they actually have in stock at a warehouse in town. You’re getting the discount because of the lack of choice. They’re not going to do any kind of custom styling for you. Most of the cabinets that you order (even at big-box discount stores such as Home Depot) are what is called “semi-custom,” with a wide range of options on sizes, finishes, and extra touches. (Even higher on the scale are fully custom, but let’s not even think about that, shall we?) You can also go to the back wall of a big-box store and find inexpensive cabinets that are in the range of what I had in my last two houses and which are perfectly adequate for a space that doesn’t get much use. The “wholesale cabinets” (which are basically “in-stock stock cabinets,” if you get my drift) fall in between the el cheapos and the semi-customs. They are a fabulous value, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am with the ones we got. (That’s been one of my most frequent words about this whole remodel/renovation: “pleased.”)
Let’s go back to the whole “lack of choice” idea; mentioned in the previous paragraph. As I’ve written before, research has shown that, while human beings think they like to have lots of choices, in reality they’re happier with a limited range. (I realized as I was writing this paragraph that I’ve never posted about a great book on choice I read several years ago: watch for that later on this week.) In the classic jam experiment, which I believe I’ve also mentioned before, people bought more jam and were happier with their choices when they could try samples from six different choices vs. 24. At some point the whole thing gets too confusing. (Was that gooseberry or marionberry that I liked so much?) This overabundance of options leads to people hiring designers/decorators to help them navigate the waters, when in reality they could save themselves a lot of hassle by just limiting their choices in the first place. Too many variables drive me crazy; that’s why I refused to participate in the great trek to the carpet showroom back when I was helping pick out the new floor coverings for our church. I’m afraid I came across as somewhat of a grouch about this whole process and ended up dropping out completely, but I just couldn’t face that showroom with its hundreds of samples. How could we possibly narrow it down to one when confronted with such abundance?
One more item about these cabinets and then I’ll stop for now. You’ll notice that the door handles are very simple and functional. I would have liked not to have any handles at all, as they’re such magnets for crud in a kitchen, but I couldn’t specify the little grooves (“chamfers”) that would have allowed easy opening without handles. And I don’t know that the cabinet layout would have lent itself to that option anyway. So Jim and I pondered our options. Did you know that you can spend $11 per handle if you’re so inclined? (And that was just at Lowe’s, not some fancy kitchen & bath store. Who knows how much you can spend at one of those places? Answer: As much as you’d like. And don’t get me started on those fancy handles with decorative touches that would require a toothbrush to clean them, at least in my messy kitchen.) The expensive handles were actually quite nice, but come on, people! So we wandered over to the not-so-fancy aisle and found some for about $3, but we didn’t go ahead and order them—something to do with using our 5% discount card. When we went back and looked at them again I realized that, while they were very nicely designed, they were just too chunky-looking for our small space. We ended up going with the in-stock $1.96 ones. So in this particular area we chose something at the bottom of the price range, but not because of the money per se, since we saved only about $36.
There you have it. Limited choices, function over form, simplicity. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? But my kitchen is beautiful. As the great Don Aslett says in Make Your House Do the Housework
Do you have some choices to make? How could you simplify them?