the one above looks nice, but I find that the ones with no toekick and with a back 90 degrees from the seat are not comfortable for me. We got a quote a year or so back when designing our floor plan that was something in the range of 2200 plus the fabric for the cushions. I need to go back soon and get more definitive. This was from a place recommended to me by a designer I know. If you drove by, you would just think it was a generic upholstery place, but it turns out they do a lot of work for restaurants and they know a lot about this type of seating and all the variables to consider. I know our cabinetmaker could make one that was really pretty, but I don't know that it would be comfortable, unless we just got lucky!

Old River Cabinets is a custom company like Geppetto is with pricing about the same. Old river does not have a book and is a pain to price on the fly because you have to know every little upcharge that is based in their computer system they only have. Geppetto on the other hand has a book with cabinets every 3" with countless modifcation charges that I can apply to any cabinet to make it what ever size I want as I stated in the original post of modifying depth width or height in any combination. If they do not have a cabinet I can start with I have to fax in what I want and wait for a quote back. 3" increments just gives you an easier way to arrive at an exact cost. I can stack them verticaly, I can join them horizontaly up to 8' long for a custom look when they are installed. I can change the doors add a drawer anything you can think of. I can custom color match the fireplace which we are doing. I can custom color match the door sample which has the perfect color wood she wants which she has looked for 2 years to find. She is very picky when it comes to color. Geppetto will make anything I can dream. They are custom just in a manner that is easier to price as a designer who is not a employee of theirs. My overhead excluding gas is $3,000 a month. This business is about competing with the prices of the next guy. Lowes and Home Depot who's cabinet companies they represent sell approx half of all the cabinets in the US are the largest competition. 50% markups on semi custom products are about what you have to do to compete on price but then you can not compete on being as established as as they are when you are self employed per say. A typical set of semi custom cabinets cost the dealer 4-6k so a mark up would be 2-3k per transaction. Now since most people want to go with the established to big to fail company they will only buy with you if you give them a deal they can not turn down. So you drop your margin to do it if it is possible. Or you have contractors that want to work with you where the end price to customer is close in price to Lowes and Home Depot but they want money the owner is not aware of which makes you cut your margin in half and share it with the contractor. So either way you slice it I sell cabinets for the average kitchen that are all plywood dove tail full overlay soft close full extension for 6k most of the time and make $1,200 if you are lucky! So a custom kitchen which takes about twice as much time to figure out as there are many more ways you can layout the kitchen so you do multiple layouts before you find the perfect one for the customer has 400% more profit in it then the semi custom prices of the big box stores. And according to multiple posts on here the competition in supposed "custom" is 50k and up! Where I would be a total price of half that! I was not trying to make this about me I was more agreeing with the title of the thread of sticker shock shock. I have other people who buy fix and sell condo's and town houses here in the dc area where the cabinets cost me 900 - 1200 and I mark it up the same 50% to stay competitive. That translates to 450 profit. But wait.... that customer comes from a granite company that wants money for referring the business. So when you give them a 15% discount the profit on those kitchens goes to less then 200 including in home delivery costs. The industry forces you to work on percent markups. You spend as much time on a small job like that as you do on a semi custom kitchen which pays 1,200 or a custom one which takes a little longer that I doubled the price like other companies do I would make 25-50k on one kitchen? And people want to say that is the way you stay in business because you have overhead? Sticker Shock Shock. I agree. I must be to practical. I just wanted to give some context to the prices and point out that the orignial poster was correct to be shocked in my opinion and state some facts as to why it is true. Antss is right that it does take money to sustain a showroom. But you do not have to rip off your customer to do it by doubling the price of custom cabinets. How much money do you need to make on one job to stay in business when you are talking about profits upwards of 35k per transaction?

Evilbunnie (and I love that name!), I definitely don't think your post was finger-waggie. You brought up some excellent points that I hadn't considered, such as contingencies, the my possibly unrealistic $5k remaining budget, etc. What sealed the deal for me on my decision was when I sat down with my trusty Excel spreadsheet, with this forum's advice in mind and the pricing I'd done on the things I wanted, and laid out a 3-step, 2-3 year plan. Even with doing mid-range components (nothing super expensive, but better than rock bottom), I came up with $17,500 for my total. And that's if everything had gone right. I cancelled the cabinets the next morning. I decided that I simply could not afford to do what I wanted to do with my kitchen. I would rather do a $500 patch job to get me some temporary storage and to knock out the wall to give me more open space, than to spend, say, $10k or $12k and end up with a kitchen that I just wasn't happy with. And truth be told, things always go wrong, don't they? To do what I really wanted to do, it probably would've ended up at $20k if not more. The fact is, I'm 27 and I still have student loan debt. I have a secure job that I love, but that doesn't pay awfully well (I'm a writer for my state's fish and wildlife agency). My budget is tight with a mortgage on one income and this economy is just plain scary. My cash needs to stay in my savings account. Your advice and everyone else's brought me back to earth. And I am SO thankful for that. It's a tough lesson to learn, but we just can't have everything we want at this moment, right? I believe we can have what we want, but slowly and with planning and hard work and good old-fashioned saving money. I am so glad to have changed my mind before it was too late. And how wonderful to be adopted! :)

I am going slightly bonkers and doing an about face, now considering stainless range, off-white knobs, brass trim around the knobs. Hood still to match cabinets. Is this coo-coo? I can't see how it would look because for some reason, the white knobs on the Blue Star site are not showing up as white. I hate stainless and always loved the idea of redoing a kitchen with the ability to have paneled appliances and a colored range. But now in the midst of this, it all feels like over kill in my small-ish kitchen. And I'm noticing that while my hood and range ideabooks have all white hoods and ranges, my original ideabook of favorite overall kitchen looks all have stainless. These were my original inspiration before I got all crafty with the details: And, here is my kitchen currently - the L part is what is being redone with new cabinetry / range.