For anyone who is interested, I wanted to share my experience with Barker Cabinets, as this community has provided me with a lot of great feedback on cabinets and everything else related to my kitchen remodel. There are a lot of mostly very positive older reviews, but I had a more recent experience and feel it might be helpful to others in my position. First, I will say I got so far as placing an order with Barker, but ultimately canceled it, so I cannot speak to the quality of the end product, other than the two sample doors I ordered, which both seemed extremely well made. This review is almost entirely about customer service, order process, and price, and represents my thoughts and experience only. Barker offers a great service in a really cool way - totally customizable RTA cabinets that you can see the price of and add to your cart on a piece by piece basis. It is a very cool model and gives a lot of power to the customer, but also places a LOT of responsibility on the lay customer to get it 100% right. Ultimately it wasn't the right fit for me, and hearing from someone who had my experience would have been helpful to me, so hopefully my review will be helpful to others.

With regard to the quality of the product I will chime in briefly based only on the samples I recieved. We are doing a combination of custom painted and walnut cabinets, so I ordered a sample of walnut and two sample doors: one in alder with MDF panel and one in hard maple (frame and panel). As I mentioned, both seemed extremely well made and arrived quickly. I would STRONGLY advise anyone planning to paint to shell out the extra money for hard maple. We painted both doors and did our best to gouge and scratch them. The maple and the MDF panel on the alder door showed at most very superficial scratches in the paint that could likely be rubbed out without even touching up. The alder, on the other hand, dented easily, and I imagine the rigours of daily use (at least in our house) would have had these doors looking pretty rough in a few years.

With regard to the process - many people in the past have commented on how responsive Chad Barker is and how he literally answered hundreds of questions. This was not my experience, and I think the company has simply gotten a lot bigger and busier since those reviews were written. I did get one response from Chad, when I emailed him directly, and had moderately helpful and responsive email exchanges with Clayton and Josh. Everyone did respond, usually within 24 hours, but phone contact is actively discouraged, and guidance is strictly limited to product inquiries. My initial email inquiry had two fairly detailed, product specific questions, and ended with an inquiry as to whether they would be willing to review my final plan before I placed the order. I recieved the following response: "Thank you for the interest in our cabinet line! Unfortunately we do not have the capacity to offer any layout or design work/advice here. We have taken a deliberate hands-off approach to any aspect other than the actual manufacturing of the goods." My product specfic questions were not addressed. I followed up by emailing Chad directly, and he answered my questions and said they would be happy to look over my plan before I placed my order. I ultimately posted my plan on Barker Forums, and got a wonderful, detailed response from Steve H. However, none of my other emails to Barker were responded to by Chad, and none of the responses I recieved contained the level of detalied responsiveness I had come to expect from reading product reviews. Having said this, I acknowledge that the issue was with my expectations, not with anyone at Barker. If you are quite certain what you want, don't need much guidance, and don't expect any sort of hand-holding, I think Barker would be a good place to buy cabinets. My personal preference, as a novice at this, is to have more opportunities for phone and email feedback, and yes, a little more handholding.

My impression, and this is only a hunch, is that they have gotten much bigger very quickly, and simply don't have the resources for a particularly customer-service oriented approach. Again, they make no bones about this, and I'm not knocking the approach, just saying that throughout the whole process, I would have appreciated greater input and help, given that I had never done any sort of kitchen design and was about to drop nearly 16k on cabinets. Having said that, the videos are extremely helpful, Barker Forums is an incredible resource (Steve H, who is not, as far as I know, a Barker employee, must have spent hours reviewing and critiquing my plan), and Barker is totally doable if you are willing to put the time in and take the responsibility for any and all mistakes on yourself. We had an oddly shaped, tricky space to work with, and ultimately I feel much more comfortable having expert guidance.

A couple relatively small gripes are that there are loopholes where the customer's own ignorance can really delay the process (or mess up an order) that I think could be prevented. I ordered two wall oven cabinets. For various reasons, I ordered the "wide stile" cabinets, but didn't realize that there is a certain minimum stile width. In other words, the cabinets need to be a certain number of inches wider than the oven opening, or that cabinet won't work. Nothing prevented me from placing my order, even though I had ordered the openings in a size that would not work with that particular cabinet configuration, and the initial order review didn't catch it. I heard a week after I had placed the order (and imagined it was already in production) that the order was on hold because they couldn't make the oven openings the size I had ordered in the cabinets I had ordered. At this point, adjusting cabinet widths was not an option, without canceling and placing an entirely new order. Josh, a Barker employee, did provide me with a couple of workaround options, and I think either option would have worked out ok, I just wish that there was a more written instruction for these cabinets so that I wouldn't have made the mistake in the first place, or even better, something in the dropdown menus that wouldn't allow you to order the cabinet with dimensions that are impossible. We are on a tight timeline and finding out a week later that there is an issue was a bummer.

Additionally, if there is some sort of mistake in your order that is anything more than a very minor one, you have to cancel your entire order and place a new one, which is an *incredibly* time consuming process. I found that even when I was logged in, my shopping cart was not saved on the website, only on my personal computer. When you have upwards of 60 separate items, all with custom measurements and options, logging in on a separate device to work on the order and finding that your shopping cart has disappeared is disconcerting, to say the least. This seems like it should be a pretty easy fix, and I hope they make it.

Finally, price. Barker's approach (product focused, rather than customer-service focused) is fine as far as it goes, but what I ultimately found is that, at least where I live, the savings were nonexistant. When I started having issues with Barker, I priced out two other options, which is ultimately what lead me to cancel my order with Barker. One was with the Cabinet Joint, pervayors of Conestoga Woodworks cabinets, also "custom" RTA. Their quote came in $1000 less than Barker and came accompanied by stellar customer service. My simple quote request (filled out online) had me on the phone with Ben, a sales rep, for lengthy and detailed conversations within a day of placing it. The customization and materials seem on par with Barker, they offer many more finish options, they are made in the US (as is Barker), and the quote they gave me included grain matching on the walnut doors I requested, which isn't something Barker offers. Moreover, their lead time is just over half of Barker's. The one downside to Conestoga, at least from my perspective, is that they only offer framed cabinets, not frameless. I also called a local custom cabinet maker for a quote. This is something I should have done at the outset, but I had it so firmly fixed in my mind that Barker was my cheapest option for custom sized cabinets, that I didn't think it was worth even talking to a custom cabinet maker. He gave me a quote for the exact layout that I had with Barker for about $3,500 more than Barker's quote. However, his quote included painting, installation, and all of the Rev a Shelf cabinet storage options and pullouts that I had planned to order separately as they were either too expensive from Barker or not available, and included of 6 walnut floating shelves. Taking all of this into account, he will be at least $1,000 cheaper. Ultimately, I think we're going with the local guy. All things considered, he won't be much, if any, quicker than Barker, and will be slower than Conestoga, but I like supporting someone in my community and it pencils out in terms of both cost and effort. It's on me that I didn't research this option at the outset.

Again, this is not a critique of Barker, per se. I learned a TON about design and layout, because Barker's lack of guidance in this area forced me to do so. That was incredibly useful and really required me to put a ton of thought into my kitchen design up front. I appreciate that. Barker just ultimately wasn't the right fit for me, and I got the feeling, in all of my communications with them, that, though they were moderately responsive, they didn't care that much whether they got my business. I had done a TON of research at the outset but the lesson for me was that I hadn't done quite enough. I should have looked into Conestoga or Scherr's much earlier (I likely would have gone with Scherr's but they are scheduled out till January), as they offer a very similar service at a similar or cheaper price, with a great deal more guidance. I DEFINITELY should have looked into our local custom cabinet makers at the outset, just to eliminate all options, or as it turned out, to find out that I coudld afford custom cabinets from a guy who has been making them locally for 20 years. I am sure the price of custom cabinets is heavily geographical, but I live in a relatively small town (pop 35,000) in the Rocky Mountain region, and if I had known at the outset that I could get fully custom cabinets for a slightly cheaper price, finished and installed, as Barker, they would probably be installed already. I would just encourage anyone considering Barker to go into it with their eyes open, compare ALL options before ordering, and don't expect more than they are willing to provide in terms of customer service. I don't think they represent that they will provide anything more than what they offered to me, I was just swayed by the many reviews I had read leading me to believe I would have a different experience with them than I had. I think they make a great product, I just felt, ultimately, that they didn't really care if they got my business or not (and maybe they're so busy they don't need it), that the process was fairly complex for a novice, and that the price was not a significant advantage over other available options. For this big of an investment, I really was hoping for a bit more guidance. I hope this is helpful.