Reasons to Work With a Local Cabinet Shop

Why would you want to buy your cabinets from a shop located in your own town?

When there are so many national manufacturers out there, with every conceivable style and finish available, it might initially seem like a waste of time and money to try to source product locally. You can make more money and get more reliability from the bigger suppliers, right? And many of the larger cabinet companies are hurting for work right now. You can possibly get an even better deal these days.

But wait a minute: There are several good reasons you may want to consider the local option – if you can find the right shop.
First of all, while buying out a manufactured cabinet may be more predictable (in terms of a fixed price list and a defined schedule), you may run into more limitations on what you can design. That curved walnut island cabinet may not be available from your regular supplier. You may be restricted to particular dimensions, while a local shop will build whatever sizes you want – without fillers or scribe strips. You may want a particular paint color – with a hand-brushed look – and your mass-producing manufacturer will only give you pre-finished, sprayed-on lacquer.

Consider lead time, too – a local shop may be able to turn your project around quickly, especially if you’d like to get your final measurements from rough framing (rather than pre-ordering everything before the work starts). Things may end up being built more accurately this way.

Then there’s the problem of factory-generated mistakes – how long will it take you to get a part remade, or a replacement door sent out? Or how about something you mis-ordered yourself? You didn’t order enough crown molding, for example, or not enough kick facing.

While a small problem may be easily fixable and won’t affect the momentum of the project schedule, if you encounter a big problem – an oven cabinet is the wrong size, or the wall upper over the stove is too tall – you may be looking at stopping the job while the problem is being taken care of. A local shop may be able to take care of a fix a lot faster than a factory located a few states away – and probably much more quickly than a supplier in Europe. That means your job can keep moving along, rather than grinding to a halt, which can mess up your schedule and your client’s.

Check References

So let’s say you’ve found what looks and sounds like a good local cabinet shop. Before you entrust them with one of your projects, though, you’ll need to check them out carefully. How long have they been in business? Are they reliable and do you want to entrust them with your project?

Find out, above all, whether this local shop does your kind of work. If you’re a residential kitchen designer, you don’t really want to hire a firm that does tenant improvement work or fast-food restaurant fixtures.

Ask the owner or foreman of the shop for names and contact information of other designers they’ve worked with recently, and call those people.

Does this shop communicate well? Do they do detailed fabrication drawings so you know what exactly you’ll be getting? Do they change designs without saying anything? Did the finish turn out as expected?

You may want to ask the shop for some names of end users and clients they’ve built projects for. Call those people, too, and ask them, “How was the process and what was the final product quality like? How about the warranty period or guarantee?”

If you can talk to builders the shop has worked for, you may be able to find out even more specifics – how does this company do with keeping to the job schedule, for example. Will they install their work, or is that something you’ll have to handle? How are they about dealing with mistakes? Are they responsive, and do they fix things fast? In general, do they overpromise and under-deliver, like so many small businesses? You want the opposite!