NYC Custom Cabinets
April 2, 2022 4:46 PM Subscribe
If you are in Manhattan and wanted to get cabinets/vanity* made for less than $1,000 a linear foot (that’s right, $1,000 including insurance and installation), who would you turn to and what would you expect to pay?
The person who needs this work done has a bit less than 65 linear feet to take care of and is surprised but not completely horrified at the amount of the first estimate.
*a bunch of the spaces are non standard because nyc real estate is weird. The existing vanities, for instance, are both 27.5 inches wide?
The person who needs this work done has a bit less than 65 linear feet to take care of and is surprised but not completely horrified at the amount of the first estimate.
*a bunch of the spaces are non standard because nyc real estate is weird. The existing vanities, for instance, are both 27.5 inches wide?
I got quoted just about $1,000 a foot for custom kitchen cabinets by a millworker suggested by my architect when doing a renovation in 2018/19. Probably more expensive now!
We ended up getting cabinets from The Cabinet Joint -- they source them from Conestoga, who make them to order with sizes down to the quarter inch and ship them ready to assemble. Our GC then assembled them and billed us hourly. All together we ended up at about $500 a foot, including materials and assembly, and we got beautiful quartersawn red oak inlaid doors and frames.
Our GC also bid on the job, which would have involved their carpenters building plywood boxes on site and hanging doors from a vendor. This would have been an intermediate price point (I think around $700 a foot?) and would have been better in some ways and worse in others. In particular, the choice and quality of finish woods would likely have been worse than from The Cabinet Joint but they would have fit better around the floor and ceiling and I could have gotten them to cope a shelf to the window moldings which obviously didn't happen with the RTA cabinets.
Unless there is a truly custom feature (like weird angles?) that you really really need, I highly recommend the RTA option -- even if you're not assembling them yourself, you still save a ton. There are other RTA companies with varying levels of hand-holding and sizes of catalogue. The thing I liked about my guys was that I had a salesperson build the order with me from drawings, which meant I had some confidence that all the pieces I needed would actually arrive. We went through something like 10 iterations of the order, too.
posted by goingonit at 6:40 PM on April 2, 2022
We ended up getting cabinets from The Cabinet Joint -- they source them from Conestoga, who make them to order with sizes down to the quarter inch and ship them ready to assemble. Our GC then assembled them and billed us hourly. All together we ended up at about $500 a foot, including materials and assembly, and we got beautiful quartersawn red oak inlaid doors and frames.
Our GC also bid on the job, which would have involved their carpenters building plywood boxes on site and hanging doors from a vendor. This would have been an intermediate price point (I think around $700 a foot?) and would have been better in some ways and worse in others. In particular, the choice and quality of finish woods would likely have been worse than from The Cabinet Joint but they would have fit better around the floor and ceiling and I could have gotten them to cope a shelf to the window moldings which obviously didn't happen with the RTA cabinets.
Unless there is a truly custom feature (like weird angles?) that you really really need, I highly recommend the RTA option -- even if you're not assembling them yourself, you still save a ton. There are other RTA companies with varying levels of hand-holding and sizes of catalogue. The thing I liked about my guys was that I had a salesperson build the order with me from drawings, which meant I had some confidence that all the pieces I needed would actually arrive. We went through something like 10 iterations of the order, too.
posted by goingonit at 6:40 PM on April 2, 2022
Semicustom mod design & installation of IKEA cabinetry have been done excellently by these ppl : Kitchen Couple. They do kitchens but may extend to other stuff?
posted by lalochezia at 6:40 PM on April 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by lalochezia at 6:40 PM on April 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: The solution ended up being: the very nice plywood kitchen cabinets with painted fronts from a well known not custom place,m because the weirdness could be accommodated with stock cabinets. And a family member with decades of custom joinery/cabinet making experience is going to build the vanities. (Same family member has already built a bed, nightstands, and a dining table for the happy couple as a wedding gift.)
posted by bilabial at 2:38 PM on April 17, 2022
posted by bilabial at 2:38 PM on April 17, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by praemunire at 5:07 PM on April 2, 2022