Shop notes · 2026-08-05

Is it cheaper to buy cabinets or have them built?

The sticker answer is easy: buying stock cabinets is cheaper than having cabinets built. A big-box kitchen can land under $8,000 where a custom one starts around $10,000 and climbs. If the question ends at the register, buy.

But the register is the wrong place to end it, for three reasons that matter more the longer you plan to live with the kitchen.

The lifespan math

Stock boxes are particleboard with thin veneers, stapled drawers, and lighter hardware. Used daily, they have a comfortable life of 10-15 years before doors sag, drawer bottoms bow, and swollen edges show. A properly built custom kitchen - plywood or hardwood boxes, dovetailed drawers, commercial-grade slides - runs 30 years and usually more.

Divide price by years of service and the ranking flips: an $8,000 kitchen that lasts twelve years costs about $670 a year. A $16,000 kitchen that lasts thirty costs about $530 - and spends those years working better.

The fit costs nobody quotes

Stock cabinets come in 3-inch width increments, and your kitchen was not built in 3-inch increments. The difference gets absorbed by filler strips (dead inches you paid for), corner units that waste half their volume, and islands sized to the catalog instead of the room. In a small kitchen - and most Fremont-area kitchens in older neighborhoods qualify - those lost inches are the difference between a kitchen that holds everything and one that never quite does.

Custom cabinetry spends every inch. With stock, those are inches you paid for and never got to use.

The middle case: semi-custom

Semi-custom lines (the better big-box and dealer brands) offer more sizes and finishes, and good ones are genuinely decent cabinets. The catch is the pricing model: the base price is a teaser, and each departure - a deeper drawer, a plywood upgrade, a nonstandard depth - adds a fee. Real semi-custom quotes routinely land within 10-20% of a built-to-order number, and sometimes above it. If you are quoted semi-custom, compare it against a custom bid before signing; the answer surprises people.

When buying is the right call

Some kitchens should be stock, and it costs nothing to say so. Buy stock when the kitchen is a rental or a flip, when the budget is genuinely capped under five figures, or when you need cabinets this month. Stock exists because those situations exist, and no custom shop worth its sawdust will pretend otherwise.

For a kitchen you will cook in for decades, or a room with walls no catalog width fits, get a built-to-order bid next to the stock quote and divide each by the years you expect from it. That per-year number is the comparison worth making, and any shop should be willing to walk you through it on the phone.