We just started our blog to be able to relay answers to some of the questions that we receive on a daily basis about our kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities.  We are also going to use the blog to highlight industry trends, successfully completed kitchen renovations and anything else we come across that might be a useful resource for our customers.   To start off the blog, I would like to show you a very successful renovation that we received before and after pictures of.  This is from a couple in Philadelphia that did the entire kitchen themselves using our Marquis Cinnamon Cabinets.  I think you will agree it turned out great.

It is amazing how many customers I talk to think they need to have their kitchen professionally designed in order for it to look nice.   While it may seem like an overwhelming task, it really isn't.   While we do offer a 3-D design service, I really don't recommend it for customers unless it is for a new home where it is hard to picture where the walls and kitchen cabinets are going to be.  If you are doing a basic kitchen remodel, with some accurate measurements, you can easily design and select your own kitchen cabinets.   If you go to the Kitchen Resources section of our site, you will find some easy to use templates that will help you with your kitchen design.

Once you have the exact measurements for your kitchen, it is now time to decide what type of kitchen cabinets you will need.   Do you need a lot of drawer space, or more shelf space?   Did you want 30" wall cabinets, or do you need the extra space of the 42" wall cabinets?  How about the corner.... do you have room for a lazy susan, or are you going to use a blind base or wall cabinet?   Once you have the measurements sketched out and you have an idea of what you will need, our staff can help you pricing out and making sure that all of the measurements add up.  The nice thing about our kitchen cabinet lines is that we use the same standard sizes (in some cases more) that a Lowes or Home Depot would use.   That being the case, you could easily take their free design service and apply it to our product line.  

So the next time you hear one of your neighbors saying they are going to hire a interior designer for their kitchen, or paid for a 3-D design service you can save them the time and money by showing them how to do it themselves

I thought I would share an e-mail that I received on Thursday.  I had been working with a customer in Ohio who was going to be remodeling her entire kitchen and one of her bathrooms.  She was on a 3 week time crunch so she was nervous about making sure that all the kitchen cabinets and the bathroom vanities were in stock.  I gave her a quote and we ended up saving her a couple hundred dollars versus the local supply store.   Even though we were saving her money on her kitchen cabinets, I never heard from her again...   on Thursday, I received an e-mail from her and she needed some help.   She ended up ordering her cabinets from a brick and mortar store because she was nervous about having problems with the order.   Four weeks later, (remember her time frame was three weeks), she received her order and some of the cabinets were missing and some of them were incorrect.   She was asking for my help to correct the problem.  

This is a great example of why ordering from the direct importer/manufacturer can not only save you time, but also save you the frustration of dealing with the retail stores.   Since we typically deliver in under 2 weeks, she would have had time plenty of time to confirm that everything was ready for installation when her contractors were ready to install.  There is a happy ending to this story... since we have all the cabinets she needs, we are going to expedite the replacement cabinets to her house so that she can finish off her kitchen installation.

We deal with a lot of rental property owners and one of them had a good point that I thought I would share with everyone.   One of the biggest challenges that you face as a landlord is how to get more rent out of your units with investing a lot of time or money into them.  If they are outdated or in need of repair, they are going to be harder to rent and you will get less rent for them (that is just a fact of life).   So when a customer approached us about buying 10 kitchens at once, I had to find out why.  He made a great point about rental units that I had never thought about.

He said there are 3 things that stick out in an apartment or rental unit:  the carpet, the kitchen, and the bathroom(s).   If any of them look worn or outdated, you will have a hard time renting a unit.  Since kitchens can be expensive, he searched high and low to find a cost effective solution and he came across us.  He said that for roughly $3,000 per unit (10 units) he could update the kitchen cabinets  and the bathroom, and raise the rent an extra $250 a month!   That basically means that he has the renovation paid off in a year, and he is now bringing in an extra $250 per unit from here on out.   Not only that, but the fact that they had updated kitchens and bathrooms made the units more marketable to renters.    I never really thought about it that way. Most landlords are looking for ways to avoid spending money, when this guy was out there spending money to make more money.  He didn't want me to mention his name, but he said it was okay to share his secret.

So for all the rental property owners and landlords out there, you might want to look at it from this guys point of view.