How to Spot Bad Kitchen Cabinets

Many homes that are for sale on the market and appear to be fully updated have a kitchen space that is actually full of dud cabinets. Even after purchasing a house that has a kitchen with beautiful, quality countertops, homeowners are surprised to find that they are sitting atop poor quality or badly finished cabinets. It is important to know if you will need to remodel your kitchen or replace bad cabinets with custom kitchen cabinets—especially when you have invested money into what should be a quality piece of real estate.

If you do find that your cabinets are bad, or simply do not like the styles, do not panic. Completing a kitchen remodel is not as difficult as it may seem, especially when you have a professional team, like Kitchen Solvers, standing by your side. Here are some tips for how you can spot bad kitchen cabinets.

Judge by the Cover

If you are buying a home or thinking about remodeling your kitchen or bathroom, you will need to know how to make sure that your cabinets are of good quality and worth keeping. Since quality cabinets account for roughly half the cost of a kitchen, they are very important to inspect. Sometimes there is no need to look beneath the surface to know that a cabinet is of poor quality. If they look cheap, they probably were, and might be impossible to properly refinish or reface. If there is obvious damage, you will probably end up replacing the cabinets shortly. Here are some signs that are easy to spot that will let you know that the cabinets are no good:

• Excess wear on the fronts of doors and drawer pulls.
• Flaky surfaces that indicate photo simulated wood grain. These are very cheap materials that are often a combination of pressboard and paper.
• Misaligned cabinets doors or drawers.
• Missing cabinet faces.

Some things, such as wear or missing faces, can be replaced and recovered to look like new, but only if the cabinets themselves are of good quality wood and have been well cared for through the years.

Take an Inside Look

You cannot just walk into a kitchen and like the look of cabinets to know if they are of good quality. To determine the quality, you will have to take a closer look inside. Pull out a few drawers and make a note of how they have been constructed. Low quality cabinets are built using staples and wood glue on thin, lightweight wood that is often manufactured. If the drawer slides are made from flimsy metals or non existent, they are generally of poor quality. Also, higher quality drawers only use precision dovetailing in the joineries between the sides and the face.

Reface Your Cabinets with Custom Kitchen Cabinets

If you determine that you would like to start your kitchen remodel with replacing your old kitchen cabinets, refacing may be an option. This involves putting a new face on your cabinets, and requires very little time, work and construction inconvenience to complete. To learn more, visit our kitchen cabinet refacing page or contact a representative with Kitchen Solvers today.

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