mfbenson: "So in order to sell a house quickly I have to sell a house quickly." More like in order to sell a house quickly one has to take the appropriate steps to give it the best chance of selling quickly BEFORE it is put on the market instead of waiting for months without a bite...pricing it right..making sure it is in good shape, no repairs needed..neat..clean..decluttered...with good curb appeal.

We just moved in this month. I removed the fake jennaire cooktop and micro/wall oven combo. Installed a nice gas range and 600 cfm ducted hood. A clean smelling home is important and I hate lingering food odors. We removed the Formica counters held together with scotch tape. Did oiled butcher block on the island where the cooktop had been. Did porcelain tile, which I had and loved in previous kitchen, for perimeter counters with new sink and faucet. We are keeping the oak cabinets oak, as they are high quality. I added new stainless pulls. I will be painting the trim and the doors to the room all in white. I will eventually paint the island cabinets a washed black/gray color. Goal is to be done for thanksgiving. So to me, a good gas stove, good hood, and functional counters and a deep sink are what I think is important to make a kitchen a pleasure to use.

I recently ordered our cabinets from Ikea in preparation for our kitchen remodel this winter/spring (ordered now to take advantage of the countertop sale that through the end of November). We'll be using custom doors simply because ikea doesn't offer a style we liked. Its funny that people can look at the exact same product and have completely different perceptions. We've been wanting to do our kitchen for a few years and now after deciding we will be staying in this house for the forseeable future decided we would do it now, but within a reasonable budget. The standard "good" cabinet lines are not inexpensive. Standard cabinet construction in these lines includes particle board boxes & shelves with solid wood doors (and solid wood face frames if not frameless). I looked at some "upper end" cabinets and still, the standard constructon is particle board for boxes & shelves and solid wood doors & drawers. Sure, you can upgrade to plywood boxes but for our use I don't see why we would. Our current cabinets are 30 years old with 1/2" particle board boxes that have not deteriorated - a little bit of sagging in a few spots but generally in good shape. I find it funny that ikea kitchen cabinets get a bad wrap for not being constructed of "solid" wood when in fact most kitchen cabinets are not made of "solid" wood. When I looked at the ikea cabinets I was impressed. I saw very solid boxes & shelves made of 3/4" particle board, soft close doors & drawers standard - yes the drawers are not dove tailed wood but truthfully, even though a dovetail joint is extremely strong, the main point of using it in a drawer is for aesthetic purposes. The drawers themselves are screwed to the drawer face as are the ikea metal drawers. Our current 30 year old stapled plywood drawers have not fallen apart in 30 years - I don't think dovetailed construction could have done any better than that. I can appreciate why someone would want solid wood drawers but we are choosing to spend our money elsewhere. As far as the doors, ikea has cheap ones, and they have some nice wood doors if you like the styles (I'm not sure the durability of the finish would be as good as with a typical catalyzed finish you would get in a more tradition cabinet however). Personally - I see ikea as a great value on a good cabinet box & hardware - that we can customize. For our kitchen (which I recently posted a thread on), the cabinets with all hardware minus legs & door fronts came in slightly less than $2500. Had we ordered the most expensive style door that ikea offers, the total would have been around $5500. I am expecting our custom doors / drawer fronts to run around $3500-4000 or $500-1000 more than using ikea doors. For us, this was the best value, especially since i can do the install myself. We only have 1 other piece of ikea furniture in our house and thats an entertainment center down in the basement. The quality is OK, nothing to write home about, but a good value for what we are using it for. The kitchen cabinets are constructed much better than this piece. If they weren't, I wouldn't be using them.

See if you can use standard off the shelf vanities instead of something custom and put the money you save there toward complete retiling. It probably is best to rip it all out if you're going in. We found we had a very small leak in a shower floor in a small bathroom (dating from 30-40 years previous) that we didn't know about, but it was dripping water into the ceiling below very slowly over time which is never a good thing. I have to say I wouldn't want an acrylic shower/tub combo in my bathroom, but there is one in our secondary bathroom where we live now and it's really not bad. It's a Kohler. I think it's been there 25 years and it still looks new. So that really might be a good, inexpensive option for a guest bath as Patricia says. They're easy to clean.