Can anybody who has had cabinets painted + new doors and drawer faces tell me the price + approx square footage of kitchen? I had this done in 2012. I live in the SF Bay Area, so my costs are right up there. My kitchen is 10x10 and I didn't change the footprint at all. I got 25 new doors (including end panels), some large, some smaller, 7 drawer fronts, all paint grade maple. Decora shaker doors/end panels and slab drawer fronts. The cost, through my KD was just over $1K. I had everything painted professionally and that was a lot more, $4.3K. All the doors/drawer fronts were done in the painter's shop and the cabinet frames were done in place. The creamy white paint is the catalyzed stuff and has worn like iron. I had a general contractor do the door and hinge installation and other work in the kitchen, so I can't say how much of his fee was just cabinet-related. Initially I thought I'd have everything refaced. My cabs were golden oak. Home Depot sent out a guy to my house and he insisted I listen to a canned sales pitch. I wasn't born yesterday and didn't like his manner or approach. I asked, bottom line, how much. He threw out $10K, clearly uninterested in doing the work. I ended up paying $20K for my entire kitchen, including new quartz counter, backsplash, lighting, etc. Everything but the wood floor, including labor. If I were doing this sort of facelift again, I would do it the same way.

Greg, that's what I was thinking. If the plan is to have the door open most of the time, I would look at it from the other way - frame in the opening, then put a door on the back side, that swings into the little room. When it's open, it's out of the way; close it, and you have a picture of Alice's rabbit hole, or the closet to Narnia, or some other whimsical artwork. In a few years, if the kids no longer play up there, then you can take off the ladder rungs and hide the opening with a painting. For now, I would want to show off a pretty clever space!

tnx8, I totally get your frustration. :-( My husband and I have had 2 tract/production homes built -- one in 2004 (DR Horton) and one in 2017 (Gehan) -- and unfortunately, this kind of stuff is just par for the course. With the first house, we were more upset at all of the issues (we were only 23 years old, with no help/experience from our folks), but with the second house, it's different. Even though the 2017 house is nearly double the cost of the 2004 house, we didn't factor that in *at all.* We know that all of these issues are the nature of building a tract house, regardless of how much is paid for it. It's rotten, but it's just the way it is. :-( We basically went into this build with the idea that we'd learn more about homebuilding, and do a lot of repairs/replacements ourselves (we need to repair a brand-new, never-used bathtub; redo some brick mortar; recaulk a zillion things; replace carpet; remud drywall where they forgot to put some; repaint every single painted surface, etc.). We figure if the subcontractors couldn't get it right the first time, we aren't going to trust them to do it right the second time. Our 60-day Fix It List is very, very short. The only items we insisted that they fix before closing were safety related (electrical and air conditioning). I have to keep telling myself, "What I am settling for now, in terms of quality, I will not have to settle for when we build custom. That is the luxury of building custom." Building a tract home is basically, in my mind, almost like buying a pre-owned home, except you get the benefit of selecting your lot (I *had* to have minimal Western exposure, public spaces facing South, and bedrooms facing North), your floorplan (most homes have too much separation between master and kids' rooms for me), and a few of the pretty things (I hated 99% of the kitchens, and couldn't stand the lack of brick on all sides, of the houses I saw). Those are some serious advantages. :-) And there are even more serious advantages to doing semi-custom and fully custom.

Any non standard item you're inserting into a mfg process will have impact. They may not see it again this year. Maybe a few new tools/bits, stopping and resetting the fabrication and assembly line for this, restarting for any adds (always). Many shops would just say "no" or "I can't" as you are certainly weeding out the common skills, tools and capabilities. The more I think about these the more labor I see by several trades, installers, painters, etc. This is similar to how government specified products or projects get expensive... they up specify, often at the suggestion of a manufacturer or special interest, until competition falls away and bids get expensive. Happens all the time in the defense industry, school & public housing, all govt construction.