Like all the other materials in our project, we went through multiple rounds of cabinet selections.

Just when we thought we knew what we wanted and had the selections locked in, the pricing came back way out of budget. This was the most frustrating part of building a custom home. Even though you tell the vendors your budget before making final selections, you still end up getting a big surprise when the pricing comes back a week or two later. Ultimately, we had to get creative when it came to our cabinets to achieve the look we wanted.

We chose rustic beech cabinets for the kitchen with added distressing because it was the closest we could get to the expensive hand finished look we saw on the manufacturer’s website. We ran into a couple of issues during installation. One of the cabinet doors was damaged during shipping, so we had to order a replacement, which was easy enough. Then the installers discovered that the crown molding wouldn’t work with the way the soffit was built on the refrigerator wall. They improvised a solution and no one but us (and everyone who reads this) will ever really know that it was an issue. On the kitchen hearth wall, we added our own handmade vent hood cover and finished it to complement the copper backsplash. It will be one of the standout features of our kitchen after the vent hood is installed with the rest of the appliances.

In the laundry room, we decided to get unfinished cabinets without the center panels. We applied a distressed white painted finish on our own and added copper ceiling tiles as the center panel to get the custom finish we wanted.

For the master bathroom, we hunted down some antique french provincial furniture to repurpose as our double master sink vanity and make-up vanity. We had to do some custom woodwork to bridge the make-up vanity to the sink vanity, but in the end they look like they were made to go together. Then we applied the same distressed white painted finish that we used on the laundry room cabinets to get that rustic elegant look.

We used a standard rustic beech cabinet in the guest bathroom and went way outside the box to repurpose an old whiskey barrel for the powder room sink vanity.

In the end, we came in under budget for all of our cabinets and ended up with some truly unique cabinetry that really personalized our rooms and gave our home loads of character.