Medallion and P&F are both excellent, high-quality cabinet lines, and you won't be disappointed in the quality of either. Both companies have a wide variety of styles, woods, and great finishes. But unless things have changed, Medallion should be considerably less expensive than P&F -- so that may be a factor as other costs creep.

My advice is the see what you love, and if Medallion can deliver it, choose them. If they can't, then you'd need to go P&F. Medallion is also known to be very accommodating about special sizes and detailing, so even though they're not 'technically full-custom', they're pretty darned close.

We priced out having a local cabinet maker make our cabinets and they were more than Plain and Fancy, which we put in. I'm very happy with P&F -- in fact, this is the second kitchen we've installed with their cabinets (two different houses).

We have P&F natural cherry cabinets in our kitchen. They are both beautiful and extremely high quality. Several of our cabinets were custom. Our KD received drawings for these which we had to sign off on.

We are now starting our master bath remodel. For this we decided to go with Medallion, as they had the color I wanted. Our vanity is not a standard size, so there was an up charge for both the vanity and wall cabinet. P&F would not have charged for the customization and in fact would have been less. Installation is scheduled for mid-May, so I can't tell you if I like them any more/less than the P&F.

We never considered anything different in our kitchen so I don't know how the price comparison would have been.

Great, thanks for the input! It's nice to hear that P &F beat the local guy. I was getting the impression the custom cabinet makers tend to be less, but maybe not.

Did anyone do an inset kitchen from P & F or Medallion? Would love to see photos!

Thx all!!!

We priced out Medallion. They were $20,000 more than our local custom cabinet maker and the kitchen from our cabinet maker is way way more specific to our tastes and way nicer than we would have gotten from Medallion.

A lot of it is regional.

I have P&F inset, painted. They are going on 9 and have worn extremely well. I needed several custom pieces and they came up with them easily. Also I paneled the DW back then (when it was still a new idea LOL) and bought oak wood pulls from Lee Valley which the cabinet people sent to them -- they painted to match and sold us extra paint. Cabinets arrived right on schedule. When I purchased they were considered semi-custom and price wasn't most expensive nor the least. They have a lifetime guarantee.

I'm an ID and fussy about cabinets and the quality of the surface and details (and everything). I definitely would use them again and recommend them.

Farmhousegirl--our cabinets are inset. I've posted a link.

Here is a link that might be useful:

drachiele, I do not agree with your statement at all. A local shop doesn't have the advertising costs, the costs of paying the "middleman" to sell cabinets, or often the same level of labor or markup costs. Local shops don't have to ship cabinets. You also don't get up-charged to extreme extents for anything outside of the standard line since custom cabinet makers can more easily accommodate special requests because they build each cabinet to the specs of the customer instead of in assembly-line format. The people who work in a local shop have to care about quality because they often exist solely on word of mouth and referrals for their business. Often, you have the cabinets being made by owners of the cabinet shop (or relatives of the owners) rather than some paid employees in a factory who do not have the same incentive to care.

I am not implying by this that there's anything wrong w/ factory cabinets and I am sure many factory cabs are better than many custom cabinets. However, I think it is serious misinformation to suggest that custom cabinets cannot ever be as good as factory cabs.

My Amish-made custom cabinets are far nicer than the non-custom lines we looked at in terms of quality, craftsmanship, and cost. They also cost between $20,000 and $80,000 less than Medallion, Candlelight and the other non-custom options we looked at. We did not compromise quality, we improved it, and we saved significant money.

One other benefit to using a local custom cabinet maker is that more of your money stays in the local economy.

Wow, thank you all for the great info. Sounds like there is a lot of varying opinion on the custom vs. brand prices. I guess we'll have to see how it all pans out. NH baskets..thank you for the photo. Would it be possible find out what you spent for your p & f cabinets? Your kitchen is about the same size. Thanks everyone.