Best Kitchen Cabinet Buying Guide – Consumer Reports

Added style and features are making even basic "stock" cabinets more like midpriced, "semi custom" lines. More style for less is welcome news to any remodeler. But it's the features you may not see immediately that ultimately determine how well your next set of cabinets will hold up in a busy kitchen.

Once upon a time, dovetail joints inside the drawers were practically all you needed to distinguish high-end cabinets. That distinction has blurred as more manufacturers offer premium features even on low-end lines. Indeed, we found you can have these and other once-exclusive features and still wind up with shoddy construction.

A little research beforehand can save you time at the store and the thousands you can lose on less-than-stellar cabinets. Start by checking online manufacturer and retail sites and catalogs and taking a good look at store displays; you'll be able to tell the quality cabinets from the polished pretenders once you know where to look. And trust your taste; readers who chose cabinets solely on the basis of advice from contractors, designers, or architects were twice as likely to report a problem as those more involved in the selection, according to a survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center.