The kitchen cabinets are DEFINITELY NOT the same as their other furniture. In fact, it was the fear of having Malm-type dresser drawers for kitchen drawers that had DH saying "No way" to IKEA kitchens. At first. I purchased a kitchen drawer stack to "prove" to him that they were a completely different animal. Once he saw the real thing in real use, he was sold. The drawers have a 1/2" bottom and are very strong and sturdy. It is a Blum Tandembox, after all. Go check them out yourself and see and know you are not limited to the IKEA door styles. Any custom door company can make doors for the cabinets. They only need the measurements. I love my IKEA cabs!

I can understand the gavavemom's concern about the price of faucets. For the cost of a quality faucet you can buy a pretty good dishwasher or two microwaves, sometimes even a refrigerator. Why are the things so expensive? They're actually not. You can buy a good quality basic faucet that will give many years of excellent service from any number of sources -- and I mean a brass faucet with a good valve for under $50.00. In fact, I just did a search on my usual faucet e-tail sites and found name brand centerset lavatory faucets for under $30.00. The problem with these faucets is that, for the most part, they are not at all stylish. They look like the faucet in your mother's or grandmothers (as the case may be) 1970's bathroom. When you pay $600.00 for a faucet, you are paying about $50.00 for the faucet and $550.00 for the style. Most likely it will not work any better or last any longer than the basic $50.00 faucet. It's very much like buying cabinet hardware. A basic cabinet door or drawer pull or knob cost less than $1.00 -- in fact I have seen them for as little as 29¢ How, then can someone spend $25.00 and more on a cabinet pull? Easy, they're paying the extra for the style. As long as you insist that your faucet have style, you are going to pay more for it. You are paying for short production runs and the cost of designing, prototyping, testing and certifying the faucet -- which can easily exceed $100,000. Spreading this start-up cost across a small number of faucets means that quite a lot is added to the cost of each faucet. Not to mention that the manufacturer's markup on designer faucets is much higher -- they have to make their money from fewer items sold. Plus, as the originator of this thread shows, we don't fix things any more. If it leaks or stops working perfectly, we throw it out and get another one. This makes the lifetime costs of owning faucets much higher. And, it is really dumb because most faucets can be easily fixed. In almost all cases the problem is nothing more than a silicon seal. My grandfather built a bathroom into his Victorian house in 1912 as a Christmas present to his new bride. In 2012 when the city tore it down to build a new library, every faucet in the room was still working perfectly. On the hot water side of the lavatory, the nickel finish was entirely gone and the brass beneath completely exposed -- but it still worked because it had been carefully maintained for 100 years, by my grandfather, my father, and me. If it needed a new washer, it got one. If the riser leaked, it got a new one. It was certainly not a stylish faucet (well, actually, today it is stylish once again), but it worked, and my Grandfather, Irish to his bones, would not replace anything that still worked. It was a Kohler, by the way. Anyway, so long as you require a faucet be stylish, you are going to pay for the style. The more style, the more you are going to pay. If you want the major league bragging rights of owning a Philipp Starck-Designed Axor (Hansgrohe) faucet, you will pay a major league price. Or, for 1/10th the price, you can own a Delta or Moen that will last nearly forever. You are the buyer, and the choice is yours. So, what's it going to be?

>For me however, given the choice in cabinetry, I'd go solid, so now I will tell you why. I like the feel of the heavier doors. A solid panel is also easier to repair if it gets damaged. I've seen some veneer panels completely blow out when hit hard enough. Plywood and veneer aren't the same thing, and both come in many thicknesses. I have no idea what you mean by "blow out", but properly glued veneer (or properly made plywood) will never delaminate. OTOH, only a fool would make guarantees about solid wood and warping and splitting on larger panels. Many companies, for that reason, will either not make the large doors without extra stiles or will not guarantee them. If you have a raised panel fridge door with just two panels, for instance, all the luck to you, but there's a reason that raised panel passageway doors are made with SMALL panels. >I've had several clients complain about the rattly sound when closing a door with a thin center panel (especially if the doors are large...tall 42" uppers and pantry doors are the worst). You don't think about that until you're using it everyday. You mean that the whole DOOR vibrates? Or that the panel vibrates in the door? With the second, it's more likely that solid panels will develop that problem over time, since they move more with the seasons. You can reverse-cove-shape a plywood panel, too, though the results wouldn't be as pretty on the backside, but I'd take that before having a *big* solid wood center panel. The LAST place you want big panels is with solid wood. (Unless, of course, you can magically keep the moisture and temperature exactly steady year-round--like you'd have to to keep paint from splitting where stiles join, as Woodmode mentioned.) It will warp very rapidly. You're courting disaster if you insist on it. If you have to have solid wood on big doors--if, for instance, you have the actual panel with a cove facing out--then you should keep the size of each panel to a reasonable dimension considering the dimensional stability of your chosen wood. That means raising the number of panels per door. >And finally, veneers can STAIN differently and AGE differently than solid wood. I've seen kitchens where the center veneer panel is slightly lighter in color that the solid wood frames. Now you're making no sense. A horizontal stile will look a different color from a vertical stile because of the direction of the wood grain. This is true with the vast majority of stain colors. Natural variation in the wood mean that panels and stiles will also look slightly different colors to a very careful eye. The BEST way to get panels to look the same, if you're not doing an almost opaque stain, is with veneers. (True veneers, not plywood.) The BEST way is to book match or slip match veneers. Without that, the best you can do is to do a "pleasing match" of solid woods--that is, select them to make sure they are all the same color. If some moron didn't do so, blaming the veneering process (or the fact that they used plywood) shows an astonishing lack of comprehension of what veneer/plywood is. If you like solid wood panels because you think they're more authentic, sure, whatever, I'll give it to you. If you like the idea of being able to put an enormous gouge in a piece of furniture and the color underneath being able to be stained to the same color, I'll agree but I'll think you're crazy since any sensible person would fill it, sand it, stain it, and make it disappear. But if you're pretending that, in performance, solid wood is superior for a flat panel application or if you're pretending that the most exquisite furniture made today isn't enormously dominated by rare and beautiful veneers...you're selling your clients a load of nonsense. The very best casework is made with a mixture of plywood, veneers, inlays, and solid wood--typically, in that order. The pieces that are worth more than my car ever was rarely have more than trace amounts of solid wood. Pretending that solid wood=high quality is dangerously deceptive. The stile-and-panel style door was originally developed because slabs of solid wood warp so dramatically. (Yes, solid-wood panels work--as long as you keep the doors within reasonable sizes ***for the material.*** Many people don't want that, though....) Historically...yes, Shakers wanted simpler designs. They couldn't change the existence of stiles-plus-panels because plywood technology didn't exist yet. The cove actually has a function in solid-panel doors, so they kept it and reversed it to make it seem less decorative. If Shaker villages were thriving today, they'd probably all have slab-style doors! :-) (Which aren't just slabs of playwood, BTW, but are built up--with plywood and solid wood, both--and usually have...yes, veneers, if they are any size at all. Those amazing zebrawood modernist design? All veneers!)

It really does look like someone bought a showroom, Craigslist, or demolition kitchen. "It was a steal!" I've been caught like that, get something for such a great price, thinking "I can make it work" but just, no. Can't wait to see your sister on here and what these fabulous people will do to help her create HER kitchen :)