We love our Scherrs cabinets. They are the first group in the photo gallery on Scherr's site. Here's a picture: They were worth every penny, IMHO. Scherr's did some really complex stuff for us and it all came together well. They made clipped, fluted corners and 5/4 drawer fronts I wanted that they had never tried before. They made integrated raised end panels which was a first for them as well. As for service, I had a problem with a long drawer front that warped (it was solid wood) and they sent out a replacement very quickly (at no cost of course). The cabinets fit together tightly and are very sturdy. You need a good set of bar clamps to properly put them together. The raised panel door fronts are very solidly made and don't rattle at all because they use rubber spaceballs to hold the panels tightly in place. Leon and his brother are very quality conscious and really want to please the customer, in my experience. They started out as custom cabinetmakers. Like many small shops, they built the cases and bought the doors from large national companies like Conestoga. The reason they got into the door business in the first place was because they couldn't find good enough quality doors from the national companies for the custom cabinets they were building for customers. They then became a major source for high quality doors for other custom cabinetmakers and finally branched out into manufacturing the cases again. Kinda full circle. I asked Leon about plywood sides and he told me that it wasn't worth the extra money, even though he stood to benefit if we opted for it. The melamine boxes have been very durable. The melamine sink cabinet didn't suffer any damage whatsoever even though I had water under there for weeks from couple of slow leaks from a faulty filter that would have damaged your typical wood cabinet. I ran a bead of silicone caulk around the corners of the base to seal it when I assembled it and as a result the cabinet looks brand new despite the floods. Their cabinets are of better quality than almost anything I have seen elsewhere. I also have some IKEA cabinets in other rooms of our house. We installed IKEA at my son's house since it is his starter home and the IKEAs were the cheapest plus they fit the space well. I like IKEA and their quality is very good, but not as good as Scherr's. The box on the Scherr's cabinet is more sturdy and fits together more tightly. IKEA also has a limited number of styles and doesn't have all the sizes some cabinet companies have. For instance, I needed 36" tall cabinets and they didn't have them. I also needed other widths they didn't carry. With Scherr's I saved a few thousand bucks over the up-scale semi-custom I was considering at first. And of the 22 cabinets in our kitchen, only 6 are stock sizes. Everything was made to exactly fit and waste not a square inch. However, if you can limit yourself the the IKEA sizes, they are a wonderful cabinet also and I have no complaints with mine. Matching Scherr's doors to their boxes might be a good way to save some money and still get the look you want. Plus you could have Scherr's make any special cabinets you need.

I would like to thank everyone who commented on the problem. The cabinets are 5/8". I am most concerned about the following: (1) If I choose to have the carcasses remanufactured in plywood I worry that the doors may not fit exactly right. These are frameless cabinets and the tolerances are very tight. When you look at them all you see is doors. How the doors hang is critical to the asthetics of the cabinets. If the cabinets were framed cabinets how the doors hang would not be as critical. (2) In frameless cabinets particle board and mdf seem to be the standard because of the stability of these materials over plywood. In frameless cabinets it is important to maintain the squareness of the cabinet. Without a face frame the frameless cabinets must use materials that do not change shape with changes in humidity and temperature. The KD is teling me that I already have the best material(industrial grade particle board) for the type of cabinet that I have chosen. Any comments? (3)If I take the particle board carcasses I worry about it's moisture resistence and endurence over time. Can anyone comment on the quality of this particle board based on the specifications I listed? From reading posts on the internet I understand there is good and bad particle board. Is this a good one? Thanks for all of your comments.

There are several recent threads on this (google search works way better than the site search engeine, just add "site=ths.gardenweb" to get results from only here). Might get more detailed info there. It seems that opinion is split, but my recollection is the pros here use both but don't necessarily recommend paying to upgrade automatically. I don't want to speak for any of them, but in case more of them don't stop by that was the impression I got from past discussions. This also assumes the plywood is good quality (that's a whole other set of threads if you are interested) and the particleboard option is good as both products come in a variety of grades/quality. I'm getting frameless, so consensus is high quality particleboard has an advantage for frameless. I saved the cost of the "upgrade", which even the cabinet guy recommended against.

Something I left off of my last post to another thread similar to this one only asking about Kraftmaid. There are truly differences in the types of each. I would choose furniture grade board over Chinese plywood for instance. I have not checked yet to see if the all ply Mid C cabinets I'm looking at are chinese plywood. Likely they are cause the price is so low! Anyway we missed this at the home expo in March, but my sales guy told me they were there and had a goldfish bowl with both plywood and furniture board soaking for 2 weeks. They displayed it at the expo inviting everyone to try to break the furniture board, and no one could do it. The plywood was a total mess. It just depends. Whatever you get make sure it's the best quailty and I would think you'll be fine. I noticed for instance that the KM furn board was thicker and appeared to be better quality than the Mid C furniture board.