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 as long as your room is standard. The further your room drifts from standard, the faster the gap closes. 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 from kitchen showrooms 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 and up for custom. If the comparison ended at the register, nobody would need this guide.

What the sticker leaves out

Stock comes in 3-inch width increments and 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.

Stock pricing also assumes square walls and level floors. Marion’s older housing, the foursquares and bungalows near downtown and the pre-war streets around the Harding home, was built by hand a century ago, and a century settles a house. Installers make up the difference with shims and scribe strips, then bill for it as change orders. Modify a stock cabinet enough and it loses its warranty without ever gaining fit.

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

Flat-pack also arrives damaged often enough that big-box retailers keep 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 installs them.

When buying stock is honestly right

• The room is genuinely standard: newer construction, square walls, no soffits
• It’s a rental, a flip, or a house you’ll sell within five years
• The budget stops at four figures
• You want the assembly and install as a weekend project

A standard box in a standard room is a fair deal. If that’s what a measure shows, we’ll say so.

When building wins

• The room is old, uneven, or oddly sized, which covers most of Marion’s best housing
• You plan to stay, so the fifth year matters more than the first day
• The layout has to work to the inch: islands, pantries, small kitchens
• You want a wood, finish, or door style the 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. Box stores can’t sell it because it isn’t in the aisle. Ask a shop about it before you price anything else; a measure visit will tell you in an hour whether your boxes qualify.