You might want to consider Ikea. A 30 inch 3 drawer base runs anywhere from $198 to $356, ($990 to $1780 for the five) depending on the style. I have Ikea cabinets in my laundry room and pantry and love them.

If the quality of Martha Stewart paint is any indication as to the quality of her cabinets, I'd hesitate...

Thank you for getting all those photos posted, melaska. She has great ideas, doesn't she?

I've never used MS paint; is it poor quality?

Personally, I liked the MS paint - very pigmented and easy to use. Hasn't been in place long enough for me to tell anything else...

There are a lot of great looking things in the catalog. And the doors are quite pretty and don't look like thermofoil.

The only hesitation is its Masterbrands - cheap side. Masterbrands has two cabinet boxes - a good one and the cheap one. The cheap one uses 3/8" particle board for standard construction top, bottom and sides. The good ones have 1/2" or bigger.

The drawers and interior shelving seem to be fine and have good construction.

My reason for concern is the cabinet walls and bottoms can flex fairly easily and over time pull away from the other pieces or become permanently bent. This leads to worn out shelf pin holes, drawer glides that become detached and other issues related to premature wear and tear. Spec'ing plywood isn't going to help a lot.

If installed well, if you don't have cast iron, if you guys don't attach "stuff" to the bottoms of the wall cabinets (like a tv or toaster oven), you might be fine. OR you might experience what we did with similar face-framed cabinets - they get about 5 years old and start to self destruct.

Thanks for the information, bmorepanic. I was aware that the box construction was of concern, and another poster here mentioned upgrading it. I don't know anything about this - is the upgraded construction good enough? Standard construction is 3/8" furniture board. The upgrade is 3/8" plywood - I guess you mean that this is still not good enough? The thickness should be 1/2"?

My application is non-weight-bearing, but the drawers will be used a lot. I don't want them to fail.

I finally got my MS catalogue at HD today. The cabinets are beautiful and that is the first Corian that I have really liked but WHAT is with those apron front sink cabinets? That big expanse of filler that is not flush with the doors? They look so unfinished to me, like "tidy whities" in the kitchen. Not at all like the finished installations I have seen here on gardenweb. I think you'll be fine if you avoid an apron front sink.

Our cabinet sides have 3/4" top, bottom, and sides, and the backs are 1/2". I can't imagine a cabinet made of 3/8". I think I might worry about depending on them to support heavy drawer use.

All I can tell you is our experience and what is deemed to be good. We had some matching interior uppers from the same maker - all out of 1/2" plywood instead of 3/8" and they were (are) still completely fine - no problems. The others - even with plywood sides - didn't fare nearly as well.

They do have beam-type braces down both sides which makes me feel a little better about them. I just don't know if there is a way to install them better, but my thinking would be to add some vertical ?1/4" ply strips in the small gap between the cabinets and screw the cabinets together through the sides as well as the face frame. Theory being that it becomes a shared one inch assembly.

Perhaps email sombreuil_mongrel or one of the other cabinet maker types?

From what I can tell, the 1/2" MasterBrand boxes are not available in the MS line. The contractor thought the 3/8" boxes should be fine in this use because it is a dry location. I'm worried about the drawers, though. They are large (30" wide) and there may be a fair amount of weight in some of them.

The drawer glides and box bottoms will make more of a diference in being able to carry heavy weight than the cabinet sides will. Vertical 3/8" ply can carry as much weight as you're going to be able to safely put in any kitchen cabinet drawers. 75 lbs max is the usual rating, but some have heavierr "pot and pan" options with sturdier bottoms and heavier duty slides. If you're going to be storing something like granite samples in a drawer, get something made from metal like a heavy duty file cabinet. No wood drawer box will stand up to that kind of weight long term.

Thanks, live wire oak. I'll check the rating of the drawers. I would not be putting anything as heavy as granite in the drawers.

My cabinetmaker husband, who is, admittedly, more of an overbuilder than under, isn't here for me to ask, so I will ask LWO. (I am not challenging your statement, just asking, since I don't know.) If you put quality drawer glides in, aren't they only as good as the structure you're attaching them to? Will the screws be going in deep enough with only 3/8" of material to hold over years of the drawers opening and closing? I guess maybe what you're saying is that the attachments shouldn't be stressed if the glides are sturdy?

I just know it's got to be easier for screws to loosen and pull out of 1/4" than if the screws were longer and imbedded deeper. Not that they can't be reinstalled in a different place if that were to happen, I guess.

Thanks for joining in - that's exactly what I was thinking reading LWO's response.

It's not about the vertical weight support either - its about how much weight a 1/4" screw or two will hold. And how much the sides or back of the cabinet moves.

In our case, it wasn't the glides that failed, it was the screws. They tore out of the cabinet. There were few options for moving or remounting the screws.

I want this to work out for the original poster. I think the cabinets look very nice. I wish a cabinet maker or engineer could respond because I'm unsure how much stability a front-to-back pair of side braces adds. I'm also not sure how much climate affects the integrity of cabinets.

I can say that I've never had a display cabinet with 3/8" side walls have any issues with pullout of any of the fasteners for the drawer slides. (I really don't have too many 3/8" in the showroom though.) The drawer bottom collapses first! LOL! My example of storing granite pieces was from real life. I put some overflow granite samples in a couple of the displays, and left them there much longer than I should. The drawer bottom collapsed. I knew better and I still did it. That's why I have the big ugly metal lateral file cabinet now. :)

I have had customers over the years have issues with fasteners pulling out of cabinet sides, but there's not a real relationship to the material thickness. It's happened with 3/8" and 1/2" (or 3/4" frameless) sides and generally has to do more with how rough and tumble people behave, or at least that's the only consistant correlation that I've come up with. I can also say that it's happened far less with folks with soft close drawers.....so, maybe there's something to be said about the wear and tear the vibration of slamming causes.

Maybe someone else on the construction end of the business can add more light onto the issue. I think jdesign was just posting here recently. You might send him a note and ask for his comments here. (Although I've noticed that sometimes folks who build cabinets confuse them with bunkers that have to withstand an aeral bomb assault. LOL!)

I'm wondering whether the cabinets can be shored up by the contractor on installation. When base cabinets are installed in a row, I assume that they are bolted together through the sides. Is there any gap between them, that is, are the sides flush with the edges of the fronts? I think someone suggested putting extra wood between them. Maybe he could do this, and substitute longer screws? He could certainly put extra bracing on each end, where it will be hidden behind the wall.

My dh said, "Think of what weight our dish drawer is carrying." It would certainly make me nervous to have 3/8" sides, and I'm thinking if the boxes are that light, the drawers probably aren't made much sturdier either? For the bottoms holding up? But I assume the OP isn't holding stacks of porcelain dishes in the attic, so that's probably not relevant for her use. ;-) Those cabinets would sure give me pause in a heavier use area, though. JMO.

I missed if someone addressed the counter with slanted ceiling/wall vs the kneewall coming down flush question for you, Marisany. Will you find the countertop useful, or will it, like it would for us, be able to collect junk and be difficult to clean back where it got crowded by the angle? I really like the clean look of the blue and white picture you show.

I like the clean look, too, rhome410. Good point about the difficulty cleaning back in teh angle - I hadn't thought of that. My husband is the one who wants the counter, thinking that the room will look more open with that little bit of space above the drawers.

In terms of the drawers, I'm not sure what will be stored in them. I could see putting something as heavy as dishes in, though, and they are 30" wide. So maybe I will have to go with a higher-quality box. I haven't seen anything I like as well as the MS fronts, though, even in wood. And wood is more than 50% more expensive.