The Hunt For Solid Wood Kitchen Cabinets|tips For Buying Solid Wood Faced Cabinets|what To Look For

By Author: Jason Delmar
Total Articles: 333
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Almost all cabinets these days will have solid wood face frames and doors (unless they are frameless cabinets), but where you can really judge the quality is in the other materials that are used. I have looked in many places including retail stores, close out auctions, and yard sales, but I keep finding consistently low prices online. It was not always this way, but in recent year's internet websites that sell solid wood kitchen cabinets, beat most retail stores (including the big box chain stores) in price and value.

I have completely renovated three houses and have helped with many others, but we always had a hard time finding reasonable prices on solid wood faced kitchen cabinets. First I should clarify that "solid wood faced kitchen cabinets" or like I stated before "solid wood kitchen cabinets" are one in the same. There is really no all solid wood kitchen cabinet. When we first started (renovating houses) we were also under the impression that when you bought "good, quality kitchen cabinets" that you were buying a cabinet that was all wood. But this is not the case; the best quality kitchen cabinets are solid ...
... wood faced and paneled wood sides. So the first lesson we learned and kept with us, even now, is that there are solid wood faced kitchen cabinets, but there really is no such thing as all wood kitchen cabinets.

The key to getting long lasting kitchen and bathroom cabinets is to stray away from cabinets that use lower quality materials like particle board. It just does not make sense. Particle board absorbs water, expands, and breaks down - this leads to cabinets that will fall apart. So with that being said, we started looking for kitchen cabinets elsewhere, (besides retail stores) because many retail stores sell cheap particle board cabinets. We did a few internet searches, using keywords like "kitchen cabinets" but were not finding as much as we would have liked. (Note - we found thousands of results, but not much in the way of good value and solid wood faced cabinets). Then we started expanding our search using industry type words like "RTA kitchen cabinets" and this lead to many good finds. RTA kitchen cabinets are an industry term for "ready to assemble" and it simply means that you buy kitchen cabinets and then assemble the cabinets your self. While I was a little skeptical about buying something like kitchen cabinets over the internet, once we discovered that these RTA cabinets were as good or better than assembled cabinets, we knew that this was our product of choice for any kitchen or bathroom (Side note: there are also RTA bathroom vanities).

From all of this we now had our "solid wood faced cabinet" at a reasonable price. The better RTA kitchen cabinets are solid wood faced, with particle board sides. As we mentioned before, there really is no such thing as an all wood cabinet, so the next best thing is a solid wood faced kitchen cabinet with plywood sides. These cabinets are very sturdy, they will not break down or absorb water, and in the end the ready to assemble kitchen cabinets or bathroom vanities will save you thousands of dollars over retail cabinets of similar quality.
I have been remodeling house for 15 years, and I have the secret to getting high qualitykitchen cabinetry at an affordable price. Interested in finding out my secret? Follow these links to find out the secret to getting kitchen cabinetry at 30-40% below retail prices