Windows, doors, cabinets – they all take weeks to get. If you want a new kitchen before the holidays, it should be designed and ordered now.
Oh sure you are thinking, that can’t be right – in those DIY shows it takes three days and sometimes less to get those projects done.
Well, those DIY shows are good because they introduce the public to new materials, new colors and new ways to lay out a room. But, watch the next one a little closer. See how green the lawn is in the first couple of minutes and no one is wearing a coat?
Then later in the show, people look a little more bundled up and finally, when the happy couple walks into the house – there’s snow on the ground and they are wearing parkas. What you need to remember is that cabinets, doors and windows – especially cabinets and doors, are not mass produced.
A certain amount of cabinets are ordered and the line gets fired up in Indiana or South Dakota and your cabinets are being created. There’s a cabinet frame most of the time and hinges and doors and certain colors and maybe a glaze or some other treatment and three weeks have slipped by. Then they wait until there’s enough product to fill a truck and get it shipped.
Three to six weeks later your cabinets are here – and now you have to make sure your contractor has time to install them.
And what about those stunning exterior doors? Different colors on the inside and outside, different lock setups, different sizes, one side lite or two? How about a transom? Add an ornate design in the caning, a little wrought iron decoration, and your door shows up four to six weeks after you ordered it. You don’t want it snowing on the install day.
When you are planning a project, get a realistic timeline in your mind and understand there may be things along the way that we can’t control and neither can you. The factory is in the middle of nowhere and it closed for two days because they had electrical problems, the truck driver miscalculated the weather and the diesel froze, one cabinet is missing and its getting put on the next truck, all the orders were on one computer drive and it crashed and it will take a week to restore the data at the factory.
Yes, all these things have happened and each of them delayed someone’s project that needed to get done. Plan with a realistic timeline in mind – and then add a week for things you can’t control.