But if anything goes wrong with your order, expect to be treated like a common thief, and for any kind of resolution to take a weeks while your project grinds to a very expensive and lengthy halt.
And I suppose if you got your order without damage or being shorted, all would be rosy as they are nice cabinets. This company has a slick website, and I appreciated their kitchen design team. Instead of sending me replacement assembled cabinets, they sent me cabinet parts! Did I get refunded for having to now tear down and reassemble these cabinets? You can be sure I was not. As for the damaged cabinets - I paid extra for my cabinets to be assembled. They held up my project two weeks - without apology - as they "investigated" who was at fault - the transit company, the manufacturer or me! Unbelievable! When it was finally, and I mean finally, determined that the manufacturer had shorted me to the two cabinets, they ordered them to be sent. When the delivery arrived (late) it was two cabinets short. In buying an RTA kitchen, the home-owner needs to balance saving money and all the other advantages with these slight disadvantages.Buyer beware! I can only image any positive review of this company is either planted or made by someone who had no issues at all with their order! In my case, I ordered $8,000 worth of a total of 30 cabinets. The biggest drawback with an RTA cabinet, is that it needs assembled – although this is not a difficult process for someone with even moderate DIY skills and simple tools – many choose to pay their kitchen installers to do this in addition to the installation costs.
Sometimes it rains…ĭelivery windows can be 1-3 hours, am/pm or all day – so if you need help with bringing your kitchen indoors, your help will need to be available for the whole window.
The driver may wait up to 30 minutes for the home-owner to check the delivery, then go. Where assembled cabinets tend to be delivered under cover into the home’s garage or a spare room, RTA deliveries are on the whole kerbside.Ī kerbside delivery will (usually but not always) entail a truck with a tail-lift – the driver will wheel a shipping pallet or pallets with stacked and wrapped product boxes onto the lift, lower the lift and wheel the pack to the kerb where it becomes the home-owner’s responsibility. Going the RTA route also means there’s less hand-holding at delivery.
This is not so much a problem with cabinet doors as many RTA kitchen companies also provide free door samples.
RTA Kitchen DisadvantagesĪs most RTA kitchen cabinet manufacturers sell from websites it’s impossible to see the cabinet quality prior to ordering unless there is a local showroom or you place a trial order for a single cabinet. Provided the home owner has taken accurate measurements, this service can save an additional $4-500 in design fees over and above labor and shipping savings. Self-assembly or assembly using a chosen contractor will also give the home owner greater control in the overall quality of construction – after all the main body of complaints in assembled cabinets center on poor construction, lack of glue and insufficient pinning.Īnother advantage of buying RTA kitchen cabinets is that most RTA cabinet manufacturers offer free kitchen design services. RTA cabinets are of the same quality than an equivalently specified assembled kitchen cabinet and can be less prone to shipping and storage damage than assembled cabinets. If the time gap is only a few days you won’t mind a mountain of assembled kitchen cabinets taking up the whole garage – but RTA kitchens come into their own if there’s a week or more and space is tight. RTA kitchen cabinets are growing in popularity because of the potential for a double saving – a saving in labor costs where the home owner has an opportunity to build the cabinets themselves – and a saving in shipping and handling costs because an RTA kitchen cabinet takes up much less space and is easier to handle than a fully assembled cabinet.īut for a cash saving that’s as substantial as can be made with RTA (50-60% is typical), there have to be some downsides – and there are – so what are the advantages and disadvantages of buying RTA kitchen cabinets.Īn added bonus of the RTA kitchen cabinet taking up less space, is that the cabinets are far easier to store in the period between delivery and installation.