More cabinetry thoughts

I had a meeting with two clients who are building a home today. We've been working on the plan for their project for about a month already and we are still hammering out their kitchen. At this stage of the game, I'm still not sure they want to use me and I don't want to spend a whole lot more time on their plan until I know that this won't be a waste of my time.

I found out today that the construction loan they're getting for this project has allowed them a cabinetry budget of $13,000 to cover the whole house. That's a kitchen, an office, a master suite, three other baths and built-ins in the living room. Their kitchen alone is sitting at $23,000 as of this afternoon. That $23,000 kitchen is a nice kitchen and it's giving them a lot of what they loved about it when it was a $34,000 design. It's a testament to my skill that I could pull $11,000 out of a design and still have it look so close to what they are after. Anyhow, I would love to know where banks and insurance companies, or builders for that matter, get their prices when they are figuring out cabinetry allowances.

Spending $34,000 on kitchen cabinetry gets you quite a room. Spending a third of that on an entire 4500 square foot house is not something I even want to see.

So what my latest tack has been to get this price down to something they are willing to spend has been to use a coordinated builder-grade product for the island and some other accent pieces in the kitchen. That ought to get the price down a bit more but I cannot get any lower than that and still give them what they are looking for. I don't think anyone else can either.

Anyhow on a happier note, I figured out how to post photos today. Let's give it a try. Here is a beautiful set of Medallion Cabinetry (http://www.medallioncabinetry.com/) in a door style called Chelsea:

Chelsea is an inset door style and it's shown here in a white paint on maple and the islands in the foreground are the same door style only in a stained cherry.

This Chelsea kitchen reminds of a great one I did in Tampa last summer, only we used St. Andrews (a full-overlay door instead of an inset) in the same off-white. We used honed statuary marble for the counters instead of what looks like absolute black granite in this one.

It had the same 48" Wolf range and hood as this one though. When I'm beating my head against the wall about not being able to get a budget and a design to come together, it's nice to look back on some of my successes from the recent past.

Here's another nice room in another Medallion inset door:

This is an entertainment center made using the Winslow door in both cherry and maple. It's a great use of a variety of textures and colors and I love it.