Designs always belong to the designer. You merely purchase the right to use them. Most will certainly release the design documents after an appropriate fee is paid. You are confusing a design retainer with a design fee. The fee is only paid with the cabinet purchase. Or a separate purchase at least 10x the retainer fee.

That is fine, I don't mind paying 150-200 for rights to use the design, but I certainly will not be paying these designers (neither of whom were certified master designers) 1500-2000 to use their design which took them 2 hours to come up with.

If you want to comp shop, then obviously neither designer sold themselves and their products well enough to you. The designer is more important than the product lines that they carry. You're trying to shop cabinets, when you really should be shopping designers. It takes more than 2 hours of work to come up with a design too. More than double that if you want something other than replacing like with like as it exists.

Well, the way the system is setup it is not practical to shop designers as each will want 150-200 just to provide a price. To make things worse, none will show me a line item price sheet (even lowes and HD do this) so it becomes very hard to compare apples vs apples. I guess this is how the industry keeps profit margins very high. We are basically replacing like with like with a few small changes for a larger fridge and range, so I doubt it would take someone who knows their product 4 hours to come up with a design...it may take me that long flipping through a specification book.

Lowes or HD won't give you a design layout either.

Find a designer/shop that carries a cabinet you like. Give the designer a realistic budget and they can point you to your best value.

I spend on avg 1-2 hours face to face with the customer, then anywhere from 2 hours to 8 hours on the computer designing, researching, pricing, and then working up a formal estimate to present.

Perhaps you don't need a designer. You mentioned only a few changes. Many post their layout here and get better design advice than if they went with a personal designer. Once you have your layout you can price out cabinets. While I got some ideas from designers in showrooms (free designer requiring 30 min - 1 hour of work) the best and final advice on my layout came from Gardenweb. I priced out 8 different cabinet lines. The people are gardenweb were more knowledgeable than any of the KD's I met along the way. Of course each area is different.

Debrak, thank you for your response and advice. Once you had a design in mind how did you price out the 8 lines? Did you just walk into cabinet shops with the design or did you have to find out all the actual model numbers for the different cabinets from the respective manufacturers? Did you go with local cabinet shops or order online?

I realize the designer is important, but the manufacturer of cabinets is equally important. I don't like the idea of going to a designer and giving them a budget and letting them come up with a design as this type of system is created to allow for huge markups. I have no problem paying someone a fair amount of money for their time, but a 40-50 percent markup on a 25-30k cabinet order is very excessive for the work being put in. All three dealers I went to said their cabinet price would be half off list for Kraftmaid and most other lines when i spoke to them, I know for a fact from a friend of mine (who is a project manager for a large luxury home builder) that most larger cabinet shops pay somewhere between 26-28% of list for the cabinets from KM and similar amounts from other manufacturers...so 50% off list ends up being a huge markup for the design services and for arranging for the manufacturer to deliver cabinets to the home.

No one has a 50% markup on anything in the cabinet world. 30-40% margin (not markup) is average, and it pays for the lights, the displays, and the talent. It costs to be able to have things at hand for you to see and touch and to have someone that won't make too many mistakes be on staff.

As long as you are in a mid to upper range line, you really don't need to sweat the specs between lines. Any of them will perform like you need them to perform. The variables are small at that level. The variables between designers is large though, and if you get your heart set on something that isn't going to be available in your location, or the KD involved in your location is a 21 year old recent design school graduate with no cabinet experience (which is what you get when you are obviously comp shopping), then you are setting yourself up for failure on the front end.

If you only care about price, then forget shopping an design around that will be open to interpretation and cheaping down with some industry tricks. Shop a small set of cabinets that you can then compare pricing as an apples to apples reality. Do a 36'' drawer base, and an 36'' sink base, one with a flush finished side (no skins), one with an integral panel finished one side. Do 2 36''x36'' uppers, one with a flush finished side, one with an integral panel finished one side, matching interior, and cut for glass, with a simple mullion door and clear glass. Add in an stick of toekick, a tall filler, and a stick of insert crown molding with no insert, and a touch up kit. Make sure that the line is American made, has 1/2" plywood construction, soft close doors and drawers, and that you are comparing a basic MDF or MDO overlay center panel door with a basic paint finish, no glazing, unless you want glazing. If you can't get 1/2" or soft close doors without ''upgrading'' then you aren't in a mid grade line. 4 cabinets, 4 accessories. That has everything that you need to be able to more or less compare pricing. It still won't really be a full apples to apples comprison, but it will be as close as you get. And the quotes should be fairly well clustered if you actually are comparing similar lines. And that's yet another reason that the KD is more important than the price.

I don't think that 40-50% is unreasonable. How else does the showroom pay for its rent, utilities, displays that allow you to "touch and feel", salaries for the designers to answer questions, measure, draw up plans, place an order (which given the number of variables has to be time consuming at best). Some pricing includes installation. Then there is the profit that the owner is entitled to make, and the list goes on.

I went in usually with an appointment. Once I did it by email as the showroom was not close by. I knew the layout by heart from working on it for so long, so I could just rattle off or draw it out easily. I knew it down to every inch. 18" 3 drawer then the dw, then a 30" sink base, etc. I did not have any model numbers etc. They then went to work and priced it out. Not usually at that moment but some did, others would call me for another appointment to come back in. I do recall a few lines did not have the exact cabinet sizes I wanted so they gave me the closest to it. Eight easily came down to three based on value.

We chose what we felt offered the best value. DH installed.

I did not expect these designers to spend a huge amount of time nor did I expect even drawings. I already had the layout on graph paper so I really didn't need that but a few had computer systems that easily printed out a diagram when they just plugged the cabinets in. A few designers while I didn't choose their cabinets I do recommend to other people. I didn't need "decorating" help as what I got here was great.

What I was disappointed in with local designers was that they seemed to assume you wanted a diagonal corner cabinet instead of an easy reach. The idea of drawers, drawers and more drawers seems to not have had caught on here. I felt sometimes I was educating the designers in what a good layout was instead of the other way around.

It has been said on Gardenweb that it ruins you, LOL. You immediately see the flaws in every kitchen design. You "know" more than the average person about kitchens, etc.

@debrak. I think I will go your route. The layout of the kitchen is currently very good, it is just a honey colored oak which I can not stand. I looked at refacing, but the costs were much higher than I expected ($15k +). We want new counters too, so it is worth replacing the cabinets to make the small changes we want.

What may be a ''small'' change to you may be a much bigger change construction wise. You'd be wise to ask for input during the planning stages before you travel too far down the road holding onto ideas that may not be cheap or easy to accomplish in the real world.

I also suggest posting your layout here. There are lots of helpful people here who will make suggestions. I didn't take every suggestion, but I got lots of food for thought and improved my layout.

Both Lowe's and Home depot gave me a layout with the printed cabinet specs, all cabinets from the layout listed as well as the cost of each cabinet. No charge. If you are keeping the same basic layout, I don't think you will have a problem getting a layout from either one. HD did was to measure first, but I did not need them to measure, so I sat down with the KD for a few hours and worked out a basic plan. Again there was not charge and there also was no pressure to buy from her.

The KD at Lowe's was no different. In fact, the KD at Lowe's work the longest to help me and there was no pressure.

Giving out designs is a direct violation of both box stores specific written policies. Not saying that it doesn't happen, just saying that it shouldn't be. No one works for free. If it's ''free'', you're paying for it somewhere. Or someone else is paying for it.

We paid $1800 for our design, which took several iterations to get to what we envisioned. The designs wasn't exact with detailed measurements, but they were ours when we decided not to go with the company.

You can get a price from ikea by using their planning tool. It's a handy way to get at least one exact price.

You might want to manually draw out your existing design and write down the list of what you want to change. IT sounds minimal so far. If it's just the color of the oak, you can repair, restain and replace hardware for a fraction of the cost of brand new cabinets.

Also look on Craigslist. My neighbor decided to demolish his entire house and sold all his cabinets for $300 yesterday. These would have cost $25k to buy.

All the cabinet companies buy their doors from a couple of mfg so you can also just change out to full overlay doors.

I highly recommended reading GW threads and figure out your dream design/ wants first. I did that then interviewed 3 independent KDs and one cabinet KD. With GW's help, I knew more than 2 of the KDs with their 15 yrs of experience each. I threw out some preliminary ideas and their ideas about those made my mistakes worse.

The cabinet KD wouldn't share what his design idea would be so I created my own. At the end of the day, I ran my design by another KD and for $600 in consultation, the only changes that was made to my design was increasing the size of island by 2 feet, using LeMans instead of magic corner and increasing pantry by 6". I didn't use the last designer to draw up a computer design because his charge was $4-6k additional just to convert my design. He would have discounted/ offset if I buy cabinets from him.

The entire design comes from walking the kitchen over and over (15x over weeks) while I visualize how we cook or use the kitchen (per person). Also, most of the things that I learned from GW, none of the KDs even knew about. From easy reach to Servo drive. It's not comforting when these are KDs with good reviews and they handle high end kitchens for multi-million dollar homes.

I'm now using my hand drawn design and detailed drawer configurations to get bids. The final spec is something that I expect the custom cabinet maker to clean up for me after contracting.

Also, plan ahead for things you'd like to have but can't afford. For example, I want double French door ovens. I'm wiring for gas and electric in that corner and making the box big enough to hold either the Blue Star or American Range ovens in the future. .