NOW is the time to go custom on your renovation
As of this writing, new tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration will be going into effect on October 14th, 2025 that will add a 10% increase on lumber and an initial 25% increase on kitchen and bathroom cabinets imported to the US, with a planned escalation in the tariff on cabinetry to rise to 50% by January 1st, 2026.
What does that mean for you, the customer? With that increase, every showroom, designer, and/or distributor of imported pre-manufactured cabinetry is going to be passing that cost along to you. And if that weren’t bad enough for your renovation budget, don’t forget that these same designers and distributors are adding a hefty markup of somewhere between 20-50% on top of your cabinetry costs. In fairness, the distributors and designers are doing a significant amount of work to design your space and assume risk of ordering and handling the cabinets before they get to your space, but that doesn’t change the fact that what you’re getting in a pre-manufactured product hasn’t changed; limited options, colors, and sometimes, yes, inferior materials and construction methods.
This is a clear inflection point in the cabinetry options for consumers planning a kitchen, bath, or built-in project in the near future. Kitchen renovations, well understood to be the biggest single ticket renovation project easily can easily exceed the $40K-$60K range for cabinetry alone when you factor in all the markups from middle men in the supply chain. And often what you’d expect to get from that budget is a pre-manufactured line of cabinets.
Well in a few short weeks, your budget is about to get a lot less bang for your buck, and you might be thinking to yourself, “What other options are out there?”
Fortunately, for homeowners, this shift in the market has pushed the lower priced items into a similar price range as full-blown custom cabinetry, which doesn’t necessarily help shrink your budget, but does afford you the ability to get way more bang for your buck by working with a highly-skilled custom cabinet maker, now at a comparable price point.
How is this possible? Well… math…
Let’s assume that a mid to upper tier pre-manufactured cabinet costs you on average $1500 per box yesterday. With a designer markup of 20-50% you be in the ballpark of $1800-2250 per box. In a few weeks and months, that cost is going to balloon to $2700-3375 on average per box after factoring in the new tariffs AND the designer/distributor markup. That’s pretty dang near close to double the price you would have paid before. For a fully custom design you might be expecting the starting price to start somewhere around $2500 per box for a high-end frameless cabinet design.
What’s the difference from pre-manufactured to custom? Options, craftsmanship, and local support.
If you’ve never shopped for cabinets before, you might not be aware that what you get from a big box store, designer, showroom, or distributor will come in predetermined sized cabinets in probably less than a dozen color options. Sometimes that mean you have to use fillers that serve no other purpose than to get the fully assembled bank of cabinets to a certain dimension. Those fillers will just create dead, unusable space in your otherwise very expensive and brand new kitchen. Custom cabinets on the other hand, are designed to use every available inch of your space for the function that you want. Fillers on custom projects are mainly used to create necessary standoffs from walls so that doors can open to their fully designed swing capacity.
Ask any local cabinet maker what they get the most joy from, and they’re likely to tell you the look on their customer’s face after the project is installed and they realize how happy it made them. I had a customer tell me recently how overwhelmed she was because she didn’t realize what she had purchased was going to be “this nice.” It was probably the best compliment I had ever been given because it reflected back to me the same energy and care I had put into the work. It represents me and my reputation as a craftsman.
I’ve heard horror stories from homeowners who’ve had a problems with a recently installed kitchen cabinet (still under warranty) and the only way to get it resolved is going through a long and arduous claims process that can takes weeks, if not months, for any support to show up at their home. With a local custom cabinet maker, most, if not all, problems can be addressed in days. And most local makers are eager to go above and beyond to keep you happy because you’re likely a solid referral source to their next job.
At the end of the day, I’ve heard it said that you should buy once and cry once. Saving up and spending the extra amount to get high-end product like custom cabinetry are likely to sting initially, but when you realize that you didn’t spend twice on the same project because you either purchased the wrong product or hired the wrong contractor to do the job and got a substandard result, you’ll thank yourself. And now with the way the market dynamics have changed, it’s easier now than ever to treat yourself!
