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?

You can make your own stickers...find some sites on the computer and copy and paste any picture that you want...I do this all the time. Office Max has whole-sheet sticker paper with a transparent background...this works well on your white or light colored album pages. Wal-Mart has whole-sheet white sticker paper that you could use on colored pages...you just have to be a little neater when cutting them out. I did some pages this way featuring Veggie Tales and Hello Kitty...any picture you find (almost) can be copied and pasted. I either put them on a floppy disk or into My Documents and then use them from there....

Hi Mary Beth, I think what you are looking for is the Crop-in-Style Paper Sticker Binder. It sounds like what you describe and is definitely on my wish list, but not in my budget right now. I have priced them a few places on the web, two of the best seem to be at creativexpress.com (flat shipping of 3.75) and scrapbook-nook.com (free shipping). Hope this helps! Have a great day, Stacy

The benefit to having your GC or designer order materials is that they are then responsible for all aspects. If items aren't correct - aren't delivered in time for the scheduled installations or any other glitches that normally occur, it's not the homeowner's headache. This obviously isn't that important if you are just having a single item replaced but it is a significant thing to consider if you are doing a major remodel. There are numerous threads in which homeowners bought tiles (for example) and the tiles would not have been of the quality that a professional would have purchased. I think it really is a bit of how much one wants to replace your professional designer and or G/C and how much one wants the peace of mind knowing that responsibility lies elsewhere. My experience was that I wouldn't have saved much money - if anything - if I ordered items directly as the price I paid for items - even with markup - was less or equivalent to prices I would have paid if I purchased directly. Of course I only was actually looking at prices for items I personally selected - i.e. faucets, toilets etc. as I personally wouldn't have dreamed of attempting to order all of the "rough" materials used. I selected the tiles and the color of the grout - I didn't even attempt to order any materials used to install just as I selected the wood for my floors but didn't research costs for the sublayers (cork and plywood, glue, self leveling) that were used.