How to Save on Kitchen Joinery
When planning your kitchen renovation, we always recommend setting a budget or price range for your project before reviewing or picking your design elements.
Armed with this information, you can then make your choices with confidence – although sometimes, that may involve compromising on some inclusions to achieve your project within budget.
Next to appliances, kitchen joinery is one of the largest components of most renovations and so does offer the most opportunity for savings.
You may be surprised to learn that custom kitchen joinery is still very much achievable even with a smaller budget – factors like the materials, size and finish of your cabinetry will all influence how much you’ll spend.
Here are our top tips to keep within your joinery budget for your upcoming kitchen renovation.
Choose a simple style
It may seem obvious, but the less bells and whistles in your cabinetry design, the cheaper it will generally be.
Standard under bench cupboards are usually the most cost-effective joinery in any kitchen build; but once you start adding in drawers, pull-out racks, swivel pieces for corner units, concealed finger pulls or sliding elements to your design, that’s when costs can start to add up, too.
This principle also applies to your cupboard door style – skip the shaker doors and the panelling and instead opt for a door with a flat profile.
Opt for fewer cabinets
Less is less when it comes to kitchen joinery and your budget. The fewer individual cabinets you need, the less it will cost – so including larger, wider cabinets in your design over smaller units will work out more cost-effective.
Need more help in planning your renovation to budget? Download our eBook for your complete guide to kitchen renovations, with examples across a range of budgets to help you plan your project.
Leverage open shelving
Another option to quite literally cut your kitchen joinery costs in half is to ditch the wall units in favour of open shelving.
You could do this across the board, or keep cabinetry over your stove top for example where items on shelves may be more likely to attract grease and grime.
Open shelving is certainly more cost effective, though you do have to live with your items being on display. Plan out the crockery, servingware, utensils or cookware that you’ll store on your shelving and make sure your base cabinetry can accommodate for everything else.
Your shelves can either be painted in the same colour as your base cabinets for consistency, in a neutral or lighter colour so as to not draw attention, be made in the same material as your benchtop or crafted in a complementary material as a point of interest in your design.
Racks and hooks are other ways of maintaining storage options if you do decide to skip wall units.
Paint your own cupboard doors
The last suggestion on our list to save on kitchen joinery is to DIY the paint job and opt for a plain door at installation.
This is one of the easier parts of a kitchen renovation to take on yourself and can be accomplished over a weekend with a little research and a little more elbow grease.
Either ask for your doors to be left unattached, or unscrew the doors and be sure to give them a thorough clean before priming as they will have likely collected a lot of dust during installation.
Thinking about a renovation in 2022? Contact us to book an obligation-free consultation and discuss how we can help to bring your dream kitchen to life.
