Now that I have a general idea of what I wanted to do in the kitchen in adding a new wall of cabinets where the previous owner had a table, the next challenge was to finding cabinets. Cabinets are one of the largest costs for redoing a kitchen. New wood cabinets for an average-size kitchen can range from $5,000 up to $24,000 depending on the quality and materials you pick. I’ll admit that I am a kitchen snob and I wanted the cabinets to be at least as good as the Maple ones in my old house. These cabinets had pull-out drawers on the bottom and came with a grooved trim and crown molding.
I pretty much knew that getting new custom cabinets was not in the budget. I also knew that the supply chain issues from the pandemic were still around and I was hearing time-to-delivery of over a year for new custom ones. I also knew that the big box home stores had stock cabinets that were much cheaper so I started with those. The stock cabinets that are plain jane + vanilla basic. They only come in 30″ tall and not the taller 36″ or 42″ inch wall cabinets you see in kitchen designs that I liked. Yeah, I could stack them but that would add to the cost, and I might as well spend the money on semi-custom ones. Renovation is about tradeoffs and these fit the budget, so I was going to make it work – for now.
As I was thinking though using the unfinished stock cabinets, I thought about how well would the painted finish match with the existing golden oak ones. Looking at them, it seemed as if the grain on the existing cabinets was much deeper than on the new unfinished ones. No shade to the golden oak lovers, but seeing the wood grain peeking through would not make me happy really. Now I needed to figure out how can I ensure the finishes match and there’s no gain on either group of cabinets.
I went to the source of all home improvement truth – YouTube! I found several videos that gave various methods of filling the wood grain on golden oak cabinets so that when painted, it wouldn’t bleed through.
Great that it could be done, but it would be a couple of extra steps to the cabinet painting process which would add to the cost since I was hiring someone to do it for me. I really, really wanted all the cabinets to match.
Check out the video covering the design and cabinet selection on my YouTube channel:
Thanks for reading & watching!
