Are Solid Wood Kitchen Cabinets The Right Investment?

The Short Answer Is: Probably
Every situation is different. Sometimes there’s a construction project courting futurism at every level, and deliberately eschewing certain building materials. Sometimes there’s an artistic project where one sort of substance is okay, and another isn’t. Sometimes aesthetic influences your artistic decorative decisions.

Well, in such scenarios, wood may not be a good idea for the décor of your kitchen. But for the vast majority of homeowners in America and elsewhere, wood is almost always going to be a good idea for kitchen décor. Unless the wood is just too expensive to import, which is rare except in desert countries that rely on different building techniques, it’s going to be effective.

The Value Of Wood

Wood is inexpensive to acquire. If you’re building a house, you’ll find the framing of the structure is one of your least expensive costs. Roofing and framing tend to be very affordable. Electrical wiring, plumbing, and foundations are expensive; as is land. Something else that is costly are errors which must be rectified to meet code.

So with that in mind, if you’re building a house from the ground up, you can save a lot of money while retaining exceptional aesthetic in design by incorporating wooden kitchen cabinets right into the home’s architecture for the kitchen. This will reduce cost, and give you the potential for a specific design that precisely fits the needs of your food preparation space.

However, many homeowners find themselves the responsible party for a property whose construction they had no say in. A remodel becomes necessary. Most kitchens, even those that need remodeling, will have some sort of wooden furnishings already—but those furnishings may be from a bygone era, or they may be falling apart.

In such scenarios, total refurbishment isn’t a bad idea. When you’re strategic about kitchen remodel, and you do as much work in a DIY way as you can, you can get a lot of “bang for your buck”, as the story goes. While kitchen remodel can be exceptionally expensive, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. You’ve just got to make the right moves with the right building materials.

Options That Are Made To Order

Solid wood cabinetry can be made to order, and it has the potential to last a long time. Also, you can use varying staining and finishing techniques to make common wood precisely match the color schemes presently defining your home. Even further expanding the effectiveness of this technique, it turns out you can order designs that specifically match your home.

Ready To Assemble (RTA) cabinetry can be secured that results in cabinetry precisely matching even the most unique kitchen needs. At the following site, you can find quite a few solid wood kitchen cabinets that have been shaped using the latest techniques, and come in quite a variety of options. This site features traditional and RTA solutions for varying kitchens.

Combining Different Building Materials

There’s something else to consider which is made possible by wood: you can combine different building materials with ease. Wood cabinets can have glass doors. Wooden drawers and furniture can be fitted with a granite surface on top, injecting style, and structural efficiency into space.

While it’s best to go the DIY route if, at all possible, this isn’t always something feasible for homeowners. Not all landlords have skills in terms of building, repair, or other architectural needs. Accordingly, a good way to “have your cake and eat it, too”, is to commission remodel options with the cost that is outweighed by the associated benefits.

There will be an upper limit here, so you don’t want to assume without consultation unless you’re quite sure you know what you’re doing. So say you spend $20k on a kitchen remodel, but only get $23k back in expanded home value. Well, that can be worthwhile—but was it? You want a larger ROI, or Return On Investment, than 15%.

At a minimum, you should at least get a third more value than you spend. Ideally, you should double your value. So though $20k would get you all the “bells and whistles” if it only brings $23k in value, is it really worth it? Meanwhile, if you spent $10k on a remodel and saw $20k in expanded value, you doubled your money in the fullness of time—the work was worth it.

 

DIY Building Techniques Can Save You A Lot Of Money


DIY options make it so you can effect more expensive changes at less direct cost. Your biggest expense with any remodeling project is always going to be the manpower associated with completing the work. Labor is expensive, and DIY approaches replace that cost with time investment. A $25k remodel project could be as little as $16k if you go DIY.

Now, the downside of a DIY solid wood kitchen remodel project is that the time it takes you to get the thing done may be much longer. If you’re doing all the work yourself, what would take a set of skilled contractors a few weeks could take you several months to a year. Even so, what you lose in time you gain in asset retention; so such an approach does have benefits.

The Value Of Wood Cabinets In Your Kitchen


When all is said and done, your wisest move will be to sit down, take stock of the kitchen you have, take stock of the kitchen you want, and determine what available options best fit your proclivities.

Solid wood cabinetry retains structural stability, value, and aesthetic appeal over the long-term, making this approach quite recommendable. Is it always the best move? Not 100% of the time. But for the majority of kitchens that the majority of homeowners own, going the wood route is cost-effective and will expand home value.