Cabinet guide
Big-box stores do sell something they call custom, and the word is doing a lot of work there, because made to order and built to your room are two different products at two different prices.
They will order you cabinets that are made to order, which is a real thing and is not the same as cabinetry built to your walls.
The big-box kitchen departments sell three tiers. Stock is what sits in the aisle in fixed three inch increments. Semi-custom is a catalog order where you pick the door, the finish and a set of modifications, and the cabinets get built for your job from a defined menu of sizes. The programs marketed as custom sit at the top of that catalog with more door and finish choices and wider size options, still ordered against a system rather than measured off your plaster.
That is genuinely useful if your walls cooperate. What a catalog cannot do is scribe a run to a wall that is half an inch out over eight feet, or fill an opening that falls between two available widths without a filler strip.
Buying is cheaper on the invoice. Semi-custom runs roughly $150 to $650 per linear foot installed. Full custom runs about $500 to $1,200. Across all tiers a forty foot kitchen lands somewhere between $4,000 and $32,000 installed, and the tier you pick is most of that spread.
Where it gets less obvious is what you end up with for the money. Fillers, scribe strips and a boxed-out corner are what a catalog order uses to cope with a room it was not measured for, and every one of those is a slice of wall you bought and cannot store anything in. On a kitchen with three or four of them, the cheaper quote buys noticeably less usable storage.
The other cost is the parts a catalog does not carry. An awkward chimney breast, a low soffit, a sloped ceiling in a converted space. Those get worked around at a store and built around in a shop.
Stock means fixed sizes off a shelf, quickest and cheapest, and it fits square rooms.
Semi-custom means stock construction with real choice of door, finish and a handful of modifications. For most newer houses this is the sensible tier.
Custom means the boxes are made to the dimensions of your walls in whatever spec you pick, which is why it costs three to five times stock and takes eight to sixteen weeks rather than four to eight.
Take a wall that measures 142 inches. Stock arrives in three inch steps, so you get 138 inches of cabinet and two filler strips, and you paid for the floor space under those strips.
Older housing around here does that repeatedly. The Highlands, St. Matthews and parts of Anchorage have walls out of square, original openings and millwork profiles worth matching, and a catalog has no answer for any of it beyond covering the gap. Middletown and Jeffersontown stock from the mid-1980s on is squarer, and there a semi-custom order fits properly and the argument for full custom gets thin.
Ask the question about the room rather than the brand. If the room is square, buy the catalog. If the room is not, the fillers will tell you.
IKEA is stock in a modular system, sold flat-packed, and it fits square rooms at a low price with good drawer hardware.
The catch is assembly and hanging, which is where the finish quality of the whole kitchen gets decided. Plenty of people buy the boxes and hire the fitting out, and that is a reasonable split. IKEA kitchen cabinet installation covers that work, along with cabinet installation in Louisville generally if you have bought cabinets anywhere else and need them hung level.
Square walls, workable layout, budget in charge, buy the catalog and get it fitted properly.
Walls that fight you, an opening nothing covers, or a layout that has to change, and you are into custom kitchen cabinets in Louisville. The pricing behind that decision is laid out in how much custom cabinets cost in Louisville.
Boxes already sound and only the fronts looking tired? Neither route applies and you want cabinet refacing in Louisville instead, which we compare against replacement in should you reface or replace your kitchen cabinets.
We will tell you when a catalog order is the right answer for your room. Get a free written estimate and we will measure the walls first.
Tell us the room and what you want out of it. You get a written estimate broken down by stage, free, with nothing to sign.
