Kitchen and Bath Remodel

[chopnhack]

I finished this up today and man am I glad to be finished!! I love this time of the year to be outdoors working in the shop :-) Too bad I have to start another bathroom remodel next week, LOL Having extra work is good though

Master Bath - guest bath is similar






Kitchen - removed lucite dome ceiling, rerocked, spray textured, primed, painted, crown molding, new cabs, granite, etc.

[atgcpaul]

Wow! That is sharp! Not your house? Did you build or buy the cabinets? Either way you did a really nice job.

How long did it take? Maybe I don't want to know. Wife dreads having me as her main remodeler because she knows how long these projects would drag on.

[gerti]

Nice work! Yes, tell us more about the cabinets.

[chopnhack]

The cabinets are made in china (surprise!) and distributed locally. I have used them before and the quality is good for imported product. My complaints are mostly on what passes through their QC department. My supplier tells me that they are rectifying this next quarter with the main warehouse, which is state side doing all the inspection of product before it leaves. These are flat pack, but next quarter they will ship assembled... I wonder what the increase in cost will be...
Anyways, 5/8" sides, tops and bottoms, 3/4" thick shelves - both real plywood, 5 piece raised panel doors, if I had to guess I would say birch. Chocolate cherry stain with a black glaze, inside corner molding at the top, light rail at the bottom.


No, not my place. Time wise, if all the time was strung together about 3-4 weeks. Total lapsed time 2 1/2 months.. had to wait 3.5 weeks on several cabinets that were back stocked. Imagine that, probably could have built the entire kitchen from scratch faster!! A lot of restrictions on this job, being in a high rise, waste removal was difficult, bringing in materials and tools, everything had to be approved in advance with the main office, lots of staging and advanced prep. definitely not something you can wing. If you forget to bring something you can lose twenty minutes going up and down to the parking lot and back! The rest of the unit was completely furnished with a white carpet and the bathrooms of course were down a long narrow hallway through that carpet. Of course the re-tiling of those floors while keeping dust and debris of the carpet was a challenge! If I had to do it again, I would have charged a little more

[jabe]

good job!!! looks Great!!!
Lot of the cabinets are out sourced to China or other foreign countries, which is causing a lot of custom cabinet shops to close in the USA. It's hard to compete labor/price wise with China. Some of the cabinets from China were having problems in humid climates causing the veneer to separate. But saying this, most of the plywoods we buy are made outside of the USA anyway. All businesses are mindful of the bottom line so getting your material outside of the USA makes sense. Hopefully they/you will give the customer a warranty for 1 yr. or more for the material used. I'm not trying to rain on your parade but just stating a fact of business currently in the USA. Still the cabinets look great and U did a good job installing it.

[chopnhack]

good job!!! looks Great!!!
Lot of the cabinets are out sourced to China or other foreign countries, which is causing a lot of custom cabinet shops to close in the USA. It's hard to compete labor/price wise with China. Some of the cabinets from China were having problems in humid climates causing the veneer to separate. But saying this, most of the plywoods we buy are made outside of the USA anyway. All businesses are mindful of the bottom line so getting your material outside of the USA makes sense. Hopefully they/you will give the customer a warranty for 1 yr. or more for the material used. I'm not trying to rain on your parade but just stating a fact of business currently in the USA. Still the cabinets look great and U did a good job installing it.

It's true, I haven't seen any delam. from this manufacturer, but I have seen it with Borg chinese ply.

I stand behind my work and have taken care of customers outside of the warranty period. I did a job where the customer typically only uses a.c. sporadically during some of the summer months and his doors had swollen on two different occasions - i.e. two summers. The first time I was able to replace the hinges with a greater overlay and adjusted to fit. This time they had swollen across the middle to the point where adjusting to max would bind the right most door against the over the stove microwave! So new doors are on order for them. I will install after the bath remodel.

Thanks for the compliments. I had priced this job for the customer with two options, semi custom and fully custom. The fully custom would have been US made 3/4" prefinished interior maple ply. But at $87 a sheet and the cost of the finisher to spray them, even thought the quality would have been superior, it ended up being too expensive... a shame really, I thought I would have the occasion to work with the material!

[woodturner]

good job!!! looks Great!!!
Lot of the cabinets are out sourced to China or other foreign countries, which is causing a lot of custom cabinet shops to close in the USA. It's hard to compete labor/price wise with China.

The biggest problem with outsourcing to China is the shipping cost - it's huge. That's one reason so many US manufacturers have given up on sourcing in China and come back to the US. If you can ship enough volume, like a shipload, the cost per item can be manageable, but if you are only making thousands to tens of thousands of units, you will likely end up paying $20 to $30 per unit for shipping. We were paying $25/unit to ship a small radio from China a few years back, for example, but we were only selling 100K a year or so.

I've mentioned a local cabinet shop before that has "solved" this issue. They make only cabinets, doors, and drawers. They are all "custom", and they use CNC routers and other automated and semi-automated machines. They have fixed setups for the different steps - shaper to cope and cut the tenons, mortising machine for the mortises, etc. They are very cost competitive with the borg, and quality is consistent and high.

For a smaller shop that can't specialize, though, you are right, it's tough.

[JimD]

Looks great! My wife likes granite that color. We will have multiple bath remodels and a kitchen remodel in the new house. My free time is booked for the forseeable future. I'm not sure she will be patient enough for me to make the cabinets. We'll see. One of the issues I have with pre-fab is the wasted space. I made an island for the house we live in like a chest of drawers. I gained an inch of width and some height by letting the drawers slide on wooden frames instead of metal glides. She thinks they move smoothly enough to do this again. Having to use stock sizes also wastes space. In a small kitchen you need all you can get.

[Pappy]

Nice job. 3 things really caught my eye.

First was the fan recessed into the ceiling. Great idea to create air movement without restricting headroom. Even better to me would be to have an exhaust fan that would fit around the mount of the fan, but I have never seen anything like that.

Second was the end cabinet by the stove. This is an idea I want to incorporate that when I do my kitchen to give more room for the wife's wheelchair to access the laundry room which also houses the freezer.

Third was the end cabinet on the sink side that extends the depth of the wall cabinets to the floor. The transition piece between the upper and base cabinets is visually appealing. I also see it as a opportunity for a hidden knife drawer or maybe a pull out spice rack.

[atgcpaul]

Chop, does your cabinet supplier sell retail or only commercial? Know if they have a distributor in MD? Are these RTA or do you still need to glue them together?

If you remember from a previous post of mine, I considered painting walnut white to make new doors and drawer fronts for our existing kitchen. Well, I bought poplar and have it pretty much milled but these cabinets have taken a beating and it would be putting lipstick on a pig.
Wife also wants to convert all shelves to pullout drawers.

I'm actually considering IKEA and I know of a some other places like CS Hardware that sell RTA cabinets, too.