Kitchen Cabinet Doors

I remember back when we used our Get Out of Jail Free card on the Momplex, and I dreaded receiving comments about hiring help and taking a step off from DIY.

But you totally suprised me.

Instead, many of you commented that a good DIYer knows when to DIY, and when to seek help.

The primary reason we hired out the drywall finishing is tool investment.  In order to tool up to do two homes worth of drywall, we'd be into it about as much as the cost of hiring the job out. And both the Ram and I are carpenters at heart, with no desire to go into the drywall finishing biz, so it just made sense to let a contractor take on the mud and tape.

So fast forward a few months, and we are almost finished with one side of the Momplex.  And it's time to start thinking about kitchen cabinet doors.

Originally, we had intended to DIY the doors for the Momplex kitchen ourselves.  We certainly can and do make wood doors, and enjoy making doors, and would love to invest in door making tools.  ANY tool that makes sawdust is something I would love to have.

But in the end, we opted to order doors.  And here's why:

1. Mom wanted a raised panel kitchen cabinet door.  To do make a 20 some raised panel kitchen cabinet doors, we would need some very expensive tools.  And for ever different door style we choose in the future, we'd be back to ordering more bits and tools (that aren't cheap).

2. There are 21 doors in this Momplex kitchen.  If it had been just a couple of doors, I'd have been game.  But making 21 doors all perfectly matched would have been a huge task and very time consuming.

3. The doors are what you see in a kitchen.  If you have a screw hole to hide on a carcass or a rogue knot on a face frame, it all gets covered by the doors.  And we are doing full overlay doors.  The margin for error is very small because the doors are right next to each other and the human eye could easily make out any discrepancy in door sizes. Quality in kitchen cabinet doors is very important.

4. Up here in Alaska, hardwood isn't cheap.  We figured that we'd only be saving a few hundred dollars (not counting cost of tools) by DIYing with raw materials vs buying doors.  Door companies can buy hardwood in bulk at a much lower cost, and that savings is passed on to you.

5. Being preggers at the time, and not able to work to full capacity, in order to get Mom moved in to the Momplex by the Holidays, we knew we'd have to take some shortcuts to make this goal happen.

And let me tell you .... after so many years of never buying anything made of wood - of only buying raw wood and making things from it, I had some very mixed emotions about opening this package ....