Thanks to everyone on this thread for making me do more due diligence than I thought I had to. I have learned a lot about the Barker process and options and I hope it will be helpful for those of you agonizing over a purchase decision. I also want to offer the highest possible praise to Chad Barker for his patience, diligence, and helpfulness. Finally got our order placed after extensive emails back and forth with Chad. We are getting the upgrade to hard white maple with the pure white (SW 7005) finish on the Westminster door style, and the following comments are only applicable to doors that DON'T have raised panel inserts. Painted, solid wood raised panel inserts or bead board are too prone to seasonal expansion and contraction and should be mdf. Paint grade maple is only marginally harder than alder(see my previous post on the janka ratings) . Alder machines better for door fabrication and is less prone to warping. The hard white maple is quite dense and doesn't make a good substrate for DIY paint application. You are likely to encounter chipping problems because of poor adhesion. However, with the factory applied paint, the commercial priming and CV finish are just as problem free as the painted alder. The wood panel inserts for shaker style doors like the Westminster that don't have raised panels are fine for painted applications and don't have the expansion issue that leads to raw wood showing up around the edges. With respect to stains and "cleanability" - the factory finish on the painted cabinets is conversion varnish, not just paint. As a result you have the most moisture and stain resistant finish you can get on a painted finish. Because the factory finish is CV, the SW 7005 paint you buy at the store is very close, but not an exact match. Something to think about when considering crown moldings and light rails. You can always bring a door into the store and have the computer try to color match it, but I've found those results to be iffy when the new paint is adjacent to the original. Regarding costs. We wanted frameless cabinets. Not a value judgement just a personal preference. The pre-built options for frameless are pretty limited until you get up into the true semi and full custom lines. Home Depot does offer Innermost - but their style/color/size choices are limited and for what we have ordered, the price was over 30% higher than our hard maple Barker order. In summary - if the painted Barker line give you all of the flexibility, quality, and style you want and your doors are the shaker style without raised panels, and you're concerned about dings to the doors and drawers - if there's some room in the budget upgrade to the hard maple. Just bear in mind that no wood is damage proof. It's just that the denser/harder the wood the more damage resistant it is. I hope this is helpful - and good luck with your projects.

Glad you like it, Lynn. Two years later we still love it. I think one measure of how well a kitchen works is how organized your drawers/cupboards are today vs. the day you filled them. Mine are very nearly the same. The rail width is 2-3/4" all around. I put the trash cans under the sink. We used to have a trash compactor when the kids were growing up and we had to haul the trash to the bottom of the easement road. It sat by the patio door beside the stub wall. You can see it in the stub wall photo on the Finished Kitchen Blog page. It has a Tupperware box, now above the fridge, and a covered KA mixer, now in the pantry, sitting on top. We got rid of the stub wall and put a pantry there. We don't really make that much trash anymore. Now we just have two normal plastic trash cans under the sink. I think this works because we live in San Diego where taking the can outside to empty whenever it gets full is easy - rarely cold, rarely rainy, never snowy. Here's a photo of the cabinets in the bedroom. Taking a picture of them is really hard because of the window, but this is my best shot. " These are also InnerMost with a Brandywine finish except the wood is cherry, the door style is different, and we added an ebony glaze to the stain. I love the hardware on these cabinets. I also love not having dressers in this small room and clothes draped all over everywhere for lack of proper storage. Now the clothes all fit in the drawers and the uppers have sheets, towels, and quilts. So nice. Here is a link that might be useful: My Finished Kitchen page

Disclosure: We installed InnerMost cabinets this past October. When you're choosing between InnerMost and Thomasville, there are a couple of important considerations aside from price. One is just aesthetics - which look do you like? To me Thomasville looks more traditional and InnerMost looks more modern or European or something. If you can go either way comfortably, then how about space issues? For us, this was a deciding factor. Our kitchen is dinky and we needed to maximize every square inch. This photo was from granite install day, but you get the idea: The extra space comes from full access drawers which do not lose the 1.5" behind the face frame in framed cabinetry. The uppers are also 13" vs. 12", which actually makes a difference - things that didn't quite fit in the old cabinets fit fine in these. Long agonizing over exactly what to put where is also helpful regardless of what cabinets you decide on. Price: we paid around $14,000 for ours, including the cost of trim pieces and toe kick trim and such. We have what you can see in the photo, plus there's a 12" utility closet over 2 deep drawers to the left of the fridge space and a 27" full height pantry with roll outs in the bottom half you can just see the edge of on the right. The peninsula has 2 24" 3-drawer units and a 15" 4-drawer unit. On the other side of the dining room (behind the photographer's back) we also have 4 64" glass fronted cabinets. One is 24" deep and the other 3 are 13" deep. We had the glass done locally. The lowers to either side of the stove are not the same. One is 15" and the other 14". We found InnerMost to be extremely flexible on things like that. "Deals": The best I can tell, all the companies have deals pretty much all the time, the specifics just change. InnerMost had a "free" sink base in July and something about glass fronts. We weren't ready to order in July - the planning and considering stage needs to be thorough. When we did order in August, the "deals" changed. We got "free" finished ends (we had many!). The sink base freebie had expired, but the HD guy called them up and they said sure, why not? At that time HD also had a deal going of their own that if you spend x amount, they take y off. It wasn't as good in August as it was in June or July, but it was considerable. The various incentives added up to about $2500, which was good since I was suffering from sticker shock. This may not be a great time of year for the best incentives. "Particle board" - Please! it's "furniture board." Now I'm not chuckling anymore: the stuff they use in good cabinetry of the type you're considering is excellent quality, not to be confused with that sawdusty stuff that you sometimes see in chair seats under the fabric covering. Some will insist that you must have plywood, and others then battle back. We went with the "furniture board" and are satisfied with our choice. Summation: we really like what we got. Given a choice, I'd never have framed kitchen cabinets again. We're happy with the look, the quality, and the function, and would choose to pay the premium again if we had it to do over. Thomasville is also a perfectly valid choice. If you're just as happy with face framed cabinetry, then save the extra $. P.S. I suspect your final bill will exceed what you quoted above. All those little trim bits add up, but you really do need them to finish up the job.

Garbage imports both. Stay away from cheap imports.