You would be surprised at how many choices have to be made just to pick out cabinets. Wood or laminate. What type of finish, what type of door style? Solid doors or glass inserts. And that’s just the basic cabinet. That doesn’t include all the little “extras” that are out there.

I didn’t have the space in my kitchen, but you also can get cabinets that look like regular, freestanding furniture.

Here’s a sampling of what’s available (Take a look at the options in the menus. You could lose yourself in these Web sites):

Yorktown cabinetry
MasterBrand Cabinets Inc.
KraftMaid Cabinetry
Mills Pride
Merillat
Wood-Mode

What I ended up choosing was pretty close to my original plan. I just got really sidetracked with the options. We chose the Liberty style door with the toasted almond finish.

The extra options on the cabinets are amazing from myriad organizational items that hang on the inside of the doors to the built-in pull-out spice and pull-out butcher-block knife holders. I could spend hours looking at this stuff and still not make any decisions.

Here are just a few:

Wood-Mode design options:
HGTV.com

There are a ton of things to take into consideration before you purchase your cabinets, including the fact that it’s 40 to 50 percent of your budget. Here are a couple of sites that offer tips to get you started:
About.com interior decorating
30 ways to store more in your kitchen

So, we made our decision and the contractors took measurements and we were set, or so we thought. After getting the estimate from the cabinet company, our contractors came back to let us know that the cabinets we chose were $3,000 more than our bid allotment. This wasn’t totally unexpected, since the contractors warned us that the estimate was for basic cabinetry and the finish and style we chose wasn’t considered basic. Not too bad, I guess.

Now the countertops

Again, more options. I knew one thing for sure. I did not want tile cabinets again. It’s just too hard to keep clean and the texture is killer for pastry and baking.

There’s a large variety of surfaces to choose from here, as well: Butcher block, authentic stone, engineered stone, tile, and laminate, solid surface (Corian), Stainless steel and concrete.

Bob Vila gives a good breakdown of the differences between the different types.

I really wanted a stone countertop for its look and durability, but there was the expense and a little more maintenance involved. So I looked to the manmade quartz product that has about the same qualities as granite, but was slightly less expensive and easier to care for. Ceasarstone was our brand of choice, mostly because it had the color I wanted – Copper Canyon. (In true form, it’s a little darker and has more of sheen to it.)

So, the contractor goes to price the Ceasarstone for us and guess what! It comes in $8,000 over allotment. Again, the overrun wasn’t a surprise because the surface we chose was at the upper end of the price range and the allotment was based on average costs. However, $8,000 over was a little steep. We went back to the drawing board.

We researched more surfaces, considered our options and decided to swallow the extra cost to get what we wanted: low-maintenance, high quality countertops. We also decided to go with a 6-inch Ceasarstone backsplash

The orders are in

Well, now that the biggest and most expensive decisions are made, we took final measurements, had a designer draw up the specs and ordered the cabinets. Then, we waited to find out when the cabinets would be in. Once we knew that, we could back up a timeline for the project to get started.

We waited, and waited … and Halloween came and went without getting started.

This was no fault of our contractor. The cabinet company hadn’t sent delivery dates despite repeated calls and inquiries.

Thanksgiving week rolled around and we finally heard that the cabinets were coming. In fact, they would be here that week. If we had known that earlier, we would have started on the electrical and plumbing already.

The cabinets were to arrive Nov. 29, and when we got home from work, we ran out to the garage to take a look. There, in the middle of our garage, was a big empty space. What a letdown,

Apparently there was some problem with the truck being too big to deliver within the residential neighborhood. So, the cabinets had to be loaded onto a smaller truck for delivery. They arrived Dec. 3.

They look great, now I can’t wait for them to be put in.

But first, we need to demolish the tired, old kitchen and get the electrical and plumbing done.