Behind Door Number One...

I have a big kitchen decision to make. Not that I haven't had a lot of large ones up to this point, but this was an unexpected cross-roads.

I had been planning to reuse the existing kitchen doors. This entails sanding, reworking, painting, and hanging. The first snag was that I couldn't just swap out old hinges for new self-closing ones; the holes nearly aligned, but not quite. So I either fill, patch, and drill for new hinges, or I use the old and install magnetic closures. Not the end of the world, but disappointing. Then the decision to add glass panels to a few doors became complex because my existing slab doors are just thin plywood. Still doable, but not so simple. Lastly, my idea to rip the eased edges straight and add flat stock molding to all the doors was revealed to be more labor intensive and expensive than I had thought. So I would be investing a lot of time and a decent amount of money into cheap, simple doors that would never quite look as good as I hoped.

I decided to get a quote on new, unfinished cabinet doors. I hoped it would either be sky high (and clearly out of range), or so affordable it was a no-brainer. I sincerely doubted it would be the latter, but you never know. Well, the quotes are surprisingly reasonable, but not so low as to be the obvious decision. So now there is more weighting, considering, thinking, planning, and budgeting. In the meantime, I can move most everything back into the open cabinets, it just looks really messy!