There’s No Sugar-Coating the Benefits of Maple Kitchen Cabinets

Whether you’re building a new home or doing some remodeling of your current home, the kitchen is a highly prized area of any house. Kitchen cabinets play such a vital role—not only in function, but also in aesthetics—and they often set the tone for your entire kitchen. When it comes to kitchen cabinets, there are many choices of woods. Oak, pine, cherry, maple, and hickory are frequently on the list of people’s choices for the kitchen, each with their own, unique benefits and styles. Maple kitchen cabinets have long been a popular choice for its warmth and attractiveness. There are many decisions to make, even after you’ve chosen maple, which also contribute to your cabinets’ style and usability.

Maple kitchen cabinets are often sturdy and resistant to cracking and scratching, since maple is well known as a hardy wood. The detailed grain of maple makes for a lovely, intricate design. Maple’s naturally light, blond coloring makes it a go-to wood for cottage, rustic, or country-style kitchens. (And its light coloring makes it great to pair with darker granite!) Plus, its smooth texture makes it an ideal wood to be stained or painted. All these aspects make maple a beautiful choice for your kitchen.

Now that you’ve chosen maple for your wood cabinets, there are some other details on which you must decide. These items will contribute to the looks and function of your maple kitchen cabinets.

First, you’ll decide whether to choose stock cabinets, semi-stock cabinets, or custom wood cabinets. What’s the difference, you ask? Stock cabinets are the least expensive choice and can be purchased fully built and ready to install. Meanwhile, semi-stock cabinets are made from a base design that can be minimally customized by you, the homeowner, and then installed. The slight customization creates additional processing time and an increase in cost over stock cabinets.

The most expensive choice is custom cabinets because they offer virtually total freedom of design choices, allowing you to create a cabinet that totally reflects your tastes and style. Custom cabinets also have the longest manufacturing time, for obvious reasons. Once you have that decision out of the way, now it’s time to choose what type of hardware your cabinet doors will have—if any.

Some homeowners actually prefer cabinet doors without hardware, using the edge of the doors to grasp when opening and closing them. If you do choose to go with hardware for your cabinet doors, there are a wide variety of choices, including knobs, handles, and pulls. It’s best to try these various types of hardware to see which feels most comfortable and naturally functional to you; this is easy enough to do at your local hardware store. Most cabinet hardware is available in multiple materials, like plastic, resin, wood, and metals of various types, colors, finishes, and motifs. (Ever seen hardware that is made to look like kitchen utensils?)

What you choose in type of cabinets (stock, semi-custom, or custom), type of finish via stain or paint (if any), and hardware (or no hardware) work congruently to make your kitchen look and feel exactly like the kitchen of your dreams.