Hmm.. our flat panel kitchen has a combination of solid hardwood and veneers. Solid wood tends to expand/contract so we used veneer on the very large panels to avoid fit issues later. You may want to consider that when ordering. It totally depends on your kitchen design but flat panelled doors require good dimentional control so the gaps between them don't vary too much.

They can be made but they are not recommended. I would never sell it. A solid slab door will likely warp over time. An MDF core is much more stable. Most high-end slab front cabinetry is veneer. Refinishing stained cabinetry is extremely time consuming and rarely done because of the time and cost. I would not opt for solid cabinet doors just because you might want a different finish in the future. It will be less costly to just replace the doors and drawer fronts.

You should read this article:

https://christieskitchens.net/cabinets-made-days/

I’ve had flat front veneer doors in my bathroom for years…held up great and still look new. They take a beating. Love them so much I did veneer doors in my new build for everything.

@K R do the edges of the cabinets hold up? What was the material under the veneers? MDF? Plywood? Are they stained or painted?

oh and - there are different grades of veneers just like in wood. I assume he could show you a sheet (4'x8'? I think) of what he'd be using. And look at more than one. Make sure the sheets are as wide as you want. The lesser grades would have grain that isn't as nice and the pieces can be skinner.

@aziline thank you! if we were going with veneer, how thick should they be to be durable? He's proposing using 1/8" veneer, which seems quite thin... concerned about nicks and things that won't be able to be buffed out...

Standard veneer is 1/28" to 1/64"

I don't know about thickness but 1/8" doesn't seem right. A quick google shows thickness from 1/30 to the industry standard being 1/42 of an inch in the US. 1/8" looks like what is used for flooring which makes sense since the boards are narrow.

The fronts isn't where they get abused. I'd be concered about the edges. Get a sample from him and see how it is. Does it have a trim and tight edge from front to back? Is it frayed at all? Is he making them or is he buying them from a repetutable shop? Can they guarentee a coheasive look if that is what you want? There are some slab jobs posted here that look right ugly (in my opinion) but they are usually jobs where the grain is horizontal and done with no reguard to how it will look once the doors are put together.

You have a picture of the cabinets you want. Contact the manufacturer about how they're made. Ask about the material quality. Ask about the edges. Ask about veneer matching top to bottom. Get info on finishing. You need to become familiar with the details that make the differences in quality for this type of construction.

This is how solid wood slab doors were made, with battens across the back of the door. And with a stained finish even if they were smooth on the front they had grain variation like planks.

@Verbo while I do agree with you there are tons of people here very unhappy with the end product because expectations were not properly set in the beginning. I'd want to make sure I was getting a solid product that will hold up to wear and tear.

If I wanted slab kitchen doors I think the process should treated the same as your countertops. You see the panels (like you would stone) in person and agree how it will be put together. I might skip this step if he could show me pictures of 3-5 kitchens he has done that fit my criteria. Otherwise I wouldn't trust him to excute it to my expectations sight unseen. Find out upfront if your expectations or cabinet builder needs to change.

My dad built cabinets while I was growing up but I didn't fully understand why things were done the way they are until I took an Intro Cabinet building class at our community college. It's always fun to learn new things.

If you want ultimate control over the look of the wood grain, I would not consider anything other than laminate in a slab door.

Some of the really high end Euro cabinets are laminate.

I don't want ultimate control over the grain necessarily... I just want to make sure the cabinets (including edges) are durable -- I've got a busy household and expect lots of dings and scratches and want the ability to repair those if necessary... all while choosing the best material to achieve a similar look to what I originally posted. Annnnd also to just figure out why my contractor was saying solid wood cabinet fronts don't exist and if that was a red flag about the contractor?

He is correct that they aren't made. Dings and scratches are fine on veneer. Just don't let your kid take a pocket knife to them :)

Just some random thoughts and answers...

You can refinish 1/52" veneers if you are using a sander with a proper fine finish stroke (something around 2 - 3 mm). People often misunderstand sanding and believe grit is the key, in reality sander stroke is just as important.

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I make a lot of 1/8" veneers and while there is nothing wrong with that, I am surprised a cabinetmaker is going to do that since the only people making thick veneers like that are the people doing their own resawing. There is really no reason to buy veneers anywhere near that thick.

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IMO it is much more important to know the lingo than it is to see the cabinet doors. Sequencing takes a lot more veneer so if you are looking for an entire sequenced kitchen you are likely looking for book matched sequenced veneers and that is going to be a lot more money and waste a lot more veneer than just grain going the same way.

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There are a lot of myths about wood movement. Rift sawn White Oak has a dimensional change coefficient of 0.0018, so an unfinished 24" cabinet will widen about 1/8" - 3/16" seasonally in a home. However, the pictured cabinets are flat sawn and will likely move much more were they solid wood.

I have solid slab walnut doors, if a few years ago counts as recent. My climate is fairly even and they are fine. My cabinetmaker also did me a sample door of veneer (we were considering grain matching across the doors) and he puts a pretty thick edge on them. My cabinetmaker did insist on no BIG doors though.

@Fori thank you! what did you do for the big doors in that case?

textured wood laminate by siematic. there's a lot going on w higher end looks in laminate. I wouldnt rule it out...

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They are fully wrapped and plywood as the base.

Including both solid wood doors and veneers for the larger doors seems like a recipe for disaster. White Oak cabinetry when unstained or stained light needs consistent tone and grain for the cabinetry to look even and cohesive. At least if the entire kitchen is constructed from the same lot of veneer, you'll have a chance for that consistency. But it seems close to impossible to me to introduce a new lot of solid wood and expect it will coordinate with the veneer.

If your cabinet maker does not agree to solid wood doors, are you prepared to find a new one? Trust me, working with natural White Oak takes a critical eye from the fabricator. Don't select a new cabinet fabricator just because he promises to give you what you ask for. Make sure he/she can show you examples of his/her work in person.

Interesting. My doors are ribbon striped mahogany and the veneer and solid woods match perfectly . But that may be due to the dark stain I chose. It is a good point about matching with lighter doors. My home is 8 years old now and haven't had any issues with the veneer doors. I did have one tiny veneer frame edging chip but the cabinet maker came and fixed it free of charge. Anyways, good luck on whatever you decide.

I have solid maple cabin

It’s not that solid wood slab doors don’t exist. It’s that they shouldn't exist. Nowhere else on the planet has this weird expectations of natural materials behaving unnaturally. Which is why the world outside the US uses engineered materials designed to perform the way you want them to perform.

I have solid maple cabinets. The first picture is of my actual kitchen, the 2nd is a picture of them here on houzz.

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Vice versa on the order of pictures I previously posted.

The striped pieced together look, with space wasting battens, only suits a small minority of customers taste. Even battens aren’t enough to hold those together in most of the country, outside limited west coast locations, that has wide humidity swings. They would still develop splits in the joins and curves and waning.

malarkey. my sister put them in a few years ago. also , all the old cabinetry was *always* real wood.

I spent half my adult life as an expat and many places outside the U.S. have the same affection for solid wood if not more.

We have been dealing with wood movement for a very long time now and we know pretty well how to do it. The actual reason you don't see a lot of solid wood doors is because cabinetmaking is a production (manufacturing) industry in the U.S.

No cabintmaker is going to want to grab the Wood Handbook to calculate the actual size cabinets doors should be built this week to account for proper growth or shrinkage. In many other countries, this is not as big of a problem as labor is not the driving factor. If you have money to waste for little benefit, solid wood doors built by a real craftsman are an option. There is little value from the additional expenditure, but they will perform fine in a climate controlled environment.

If you are trying to get a production shop that doesn't normally build solid wood slab doors to do so, then it is unlikely to end in a good result.

Old cabinetry may have always been real wood but smooth slab doors without battens are a 20th c. and later thing. Old cabinetry was often stile/rail/panel construction.

I don't know what people have against veneer, I have a 200 year old gentleman's dresser and it's veneered and veneered furniture has been around since the Egyptians.

My solid maple slab style cabinets have battens and are 9 years old. We live in Cape Cod with vast changes in humidity levels. The doors do shrink and swell in extreme dry or humid conditions but is remedied with a turn of the screwdriver on the hinges.