We have been working through the design of our custom home build for about a year now; And even as someone who is well versed in home design and construction, I am finding the amount of little decisions that need to be made a bit overwhelming – and up to now all of our decisions have been made on paper! I imagine that as soon as ground is broken, the decision making process will increase – probably both in frequency and in the speed at which the decisions need to be made.

I’m trying to stay on top of the game as best I can, and so have been looking ahead at some of the bigger choices that will fall on our shoulders. Specifically, I am focusing on the decisions that will affect the bottom line – the total amount this house will cost to build.  With our chosen contractor’s bids in hand, we have been looking through them with a fine toothed comb in an effort to make the best financial choices we can.

Last week my focus was on cabinet design and price, specifically for the kitchen. It is well known that a kitchen is one of the most expensive rooms in a house, perhaps THE most expensive. A large portion of the cost is determined by the cabinets that are selected. The average bid that we received for custom kitchen cabinets was around $25,000. That’s not including the counter-tops, appliances, flooring, or wall treatments! Ouch!

After the sticker shock set in, I went into research mode to see if the same/similar kitchen design could be made for less. That’s when I found Cliq Studios.

I have seen ads for Cliq Studios both on Houzz and This Old House, which are both websites that I respect and trust. I figured that if these websites were standing behind Cliq Studios, they were worth looking into further. The company is based out of Nebraska, with a warehouse in Minneapolis – only about a two hour drive from where we live. Their cabinet line is constructed of solid plywood, includes ‘soft close’ drawers and doors, and has options for several specialty accessories – such as pull out garbage cans, drawer dividers and pull out trays.

Their website boasts a whole lot of FREE – Free samples! Free design help! Free estimates! Free Shipping! I decided to put them to the test.

First, I looked through their catalog of available cabinet door styles. Unlike custom cabinet services which give you seemingly endless options on color, glaze, size, and detailing – Cliq Studios offers a limited variety of semi- custom, stock size cabinets and styles. Lucky for me, their ‘Rockford’ style is perfect for what I had been envisioning for our kitchen. I ordered this style sample, in two different colors. They arrived a couple of days later, in perfect condition.

standard white on the left, cloud white on the right

It’s hard to tell from this picture, but he Standard White has a bit of a cream tint to it, which I wasn’t a huge fan of. The Cloud White, though, was just perfect!

door construction detail

Feeling pretty confident with the quality of the sample and a style and finish that I loved, I went ahead and entered some more information on the website so that I could get a bit of design help. I’ll admit that this step made me a little nervous. I spent so much time working on fine tuning the kitchen design and was worried it would be scrapped and re-designed by their personnel.

What happened was the exact opposite! Within 24 hours of submitting the design application, I was assigned a designer. She contacted me via email a couple of days later, and we scheduled a time to talk on the phone. She asked about my vision for the space, and which aspects were most important to me.

My designer stayed on the phone with me for well over an hour, working through each and every cabinet decision – her with her cabinet design program open, and me with my AutoCad drawing and Sketchup file. Together we tweaked a few items and made the kitchen the absolute best it could be, from stock cabinetry!

She worked on the estimate for a few more days, and came back with a price quote that was less than half of what we had been told by the custom cabinet manufacturers!

I am titling this post ‘Part 1’ – because my gut at the moment tells me that we aren’t yet finished with Cliq Studios. I want to do a bit more research, but am feeling pretty comfortable that we may be getting our kitchen cabinets through them! Stay tuned!

*This post is NOT Sponsored by or affiliated with Cliq Studios – these words are my own review and critique of the services that were provided to us, free of charge.