Make or buy is the wrong question as it is usually asked. It is not whether you can make a door for less than you can buy one — on materials alone you almost certainly can, and anybody who tells a cabinetmaker otherwise is hoping they will not check. The question is what an hour at your bench is worth, and whether a door is the best thing you can spend it on.

Count the hours, not the lumber

A five-piece door, from rough stock to sanded and ready for finish: rip and mill the stiles and rails, cope and stick them, glue and flatten the panel, assemble, clamp, then sand through the grits and inspect. For most one- and two-person shops that runs roughly three quarters of an hour to an hour per door, and the sanding is a third of it.

A thirty-door kitchen is therefore somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five hours at the bench, before a drop of finish goes on. That is three to four working days of one person, and it is the number most shops have never written down.

Setup does not care how many doors you are making

This is the part that decides it. Changing over to a door run costs the same couple of hours whether the run is six doors or sixty: cutter change, test cuts, dialling the stick depth, re-setting the panel raiser, then putting the shop back the way it was. Spread across sixty doors that is minutes each. Spread across a six-door repair order it is the most expensive thing in the job.

Which means the orders you are most tempted to make yourself — the small ones, the odd few to finish a job — are exactly the ones where making them costs the most per door.

The costs that never reach the cut list

Sanding

The hour nobody quotes. It does not get faster with experience and it cannot be rushed, because every shortcut shows up under finish rather than before it.

Cutter sets

A matched cope-and-stick set per profile, and another set the first time a client wants a profile you do not carry. A specialist spreads that across thousands of doors a week. You spread it across a few kitchens a year.

Finish booth time

Doors are the slowest thing through a booth because they are flat, numerous, and have to be done on both sides with cure time between. While they hang, nothing else gets sprayed.

The re-make

A panel that telegraphs, a joint that opens after the finish goes on, grain that fights you on figured stock. It is not frequent. It is expensive when it happens, and it always happens on the door that holds up the install.

Run it on your own numbers

Take the bench hours above for the kitchen in front of you. Multiply them by the rate you bill install at — not your shop cost, the rate you charge, because that is what the hour could have earned instead. Then compare it with the delivered price for the same list on our door pages, which price themselves per square foot by species and size.

For most shops the two numbers land closer together than expected, and that is the whole point: you are not buying cheaper doors, you are buying back three or four days. What those days are worth depends entirely on whether you have another kitchen to put them into.

Where the margin in a cabinet job actually sits

In the layout, the boxes, the scribe and the install — and in being the person the client trusts to decide things. None of that is substitutable. Anybody can buy a door; nobody can buy your install, your measurements, or your judgement about an awkward corner. Doors are the one part of a kitchen that is genuinely a commodity, and commodities are what you buy.

Where making your own still wins

Four cases, and they are real:

  • A single door to match a finish you mixed yourself. Nobody can match your sample better than you can, and freight on one door never makes sense.
  • A profile nobody carries. If the job needs something off-catalogue and you already own the cutter, make it.
  • Species already racked and dried in your shop. Stock you have paid for and are storing is cheaper than stock you have to buy.
  • A slow week with nothing booked. If the bench hour has no alternative use, it costs you nothing but lumber — and this entire page is an argument about alternative uses.

If none of those four describes the order in front of you, the arithmetic above is probably telling you to buy it in.

What ordering actually involves

Send finished door sizes, not opening sizes — decide your overlay and reveal first, then send the size you want made. Width by height, and say so at the top of the sheet. Doors, drawer fronts and panels in separate groups, hinge side and grain direction marked.

There is no minimum and no account to apply for: the price you see is the price, on a six-door order or a sixty-door one. Lead time is about two weeks. Everything is sourced, checked and shipped by a working cabinet shop, and it is covered by a lifetime warranty on materials and workmanship.

Blind shipping is a standing service. Ask in the order notes and your shop is named as shipper on the paperwork, with nothing in the carton naming us — so a door can go straight to your client with your name on it and no one else’s.

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