Guides · 2026-08-11

Is it cheaper to buy cabinets or have them built?

Short answer: buying stock cabinets is cheaper at the register, and it stays cheaper if - and only if - your room is standard. The further your room is from standard, the faster the gap closes, and in a lot of Marion houses it closes all the way.

The sticker prices

Big-box stock runs roughly $100-$300 per linear foot. Semi-custom catalog lines - the kind kitchen showrooms sell - run $200-$500. Shop-built custom runs $350-$800 installed. On a 20-foot kitchen, that’s maybe $4,000 for stock against $12,000+ for custom. If the comparison ended there, this guide would be one paragraph.

What the sticker leaves out

Fillers and dead space. Stock comes in 3-inch width increments. Your wall doesn’t. The difference gets bridged with filler strips - inches of wood that hold nothing - and corner units that strand space. In a small kitchen, losing a foot of storage to increments is a real cost; custom uses the whole wall.

Modification and installation surprises. Stock pricing assumes square walls, level floors, and no soffits. Marion’s older housing stock - the foursquares and bungalows near downtown, the pre-war streets around the Harding home - offers none of those. Installers bridge the gap with shims, scribes, and change orders, and modified stock loses its warranty without gaining any fit.

The box itself. At the low end, stock means particleboard boxes and stapled drawers. They’re fine until the first water leak or the fifth year of a silverware drawer. Plywood boxes and dovetailed drawers - standard in shop work - are why fifty-year-old cabinets still show up working in Marion County farmhouses.

Delivery and damage. Flat-pack arrives damaged often enough that big-box retailers have a form for it. A shop delivers finished boxes twenty minutes from where they were built, and the person delivering them is the person who will install them.

When buying stock is honestly right

• The room is genuinely standard - newer construction, square, no soffits
• It’s a rental, a flip, or a five-year house
• The budget stops at four figures, full stop
• You enjoy assembly and installation as a project

None of that is a failure. A standard box in a standard room is a fair deal, and we’ll say so at a measure if that’s what your room is.

When building wins

• The room is old, uneven, or oddly sized - most of Marion’s best housing
• You’re staying, and the fifth year matters more than the first day
• The layout needs to work to the inch - islands, pantries, small kitchens
• You want a wood, finish, or door style catalogs don’t carry

The middle path nobody advertises

If your boxes are already decent, the cheapest “custom” kitchen is refacing: custom doors and finish on the boxes you own, typically 40-60% of replacement. It’s the option box stores can’t sell you and showrooms would rather not - which is exactly why it’s worth asking about first.