All the Benefits of Using RTA Kitchen Cabinets

As much as you might love the idea of custom cabinets for the kitchen, you’re up against two formidable obstacles. One is cost, of course, which can be sky-high, and the other is time. Many communities have fewer cabinetmakers than they need, and you might have to wait many months before you can get your project scheduled.

The alternative is store-bought prefab cabinets, and while that sounds like a step-down, it isn’t always. A number of manufacturers use quality materials, employ skilled workers and have a good eye for design. However, one problem with store-bought cabinets is that you might have to design the kitchen around the cabinets rather than the other way around.

If you go the store-bought route, you have two options: pre-assembled and ready-to-assemble (RTA) cabinets. As the names suggest, pre-assembled cabinets are trucked to your house and ready to install (usually with minor modifications). In contrast, RTA cabinets come in pieces that you can carry home (or have delivered) and put together yourself.

While RTA cabinets sound like a bargain-basement option, and some of them are, there are plenty of quality products to be found, and the RTA option has many perks.

The Most Affordable Option

The top benefit of RTA cabinets for many people is the price. They cost, on average, about 20 percent less than pre-assembled cabinets, according to Kitchen Cabinet Kings, and they are often an order of magnitude cheaper than custom ones (which means you can drop one zero from the price tag). However, remember that when choosing RTA cabinets over pre-assembled ones, you do lose the workmanship warranty because the manufacturer can’t guarantee the assembly if you’re doing it yourself.

Lower transport costs

DIYing the assembly saves you money, but transportation costs are also cheaper. RTA cabinets come packaged in flat boxes that are easier to stack and less expensive to ship than bulky cabinets. In fact, if you buy the cabinets at a big box store like Lowe’s or IKEA, you can usually carry them home yourself.

Design Flexibility

RTA cabinets have a somewhat undeserved reputation for being of lower quality than pre-assembled ones, and that may have been true back in the day when most of them were made from particleboard or medium-density fiberboard (MDF). You can still find these low-cost cabinets, but quality products made exclusively from veneered plywood are increasingly common.

Manufacturers offer multiple cabinet designs with a wide selection of veneer materials and finishes. Once assembled, RTA cabinets look every bit as snazzy as their pre-assembled counterparts. That is, as long as you assemble them according to the instructions, but more on that later.

Add Your Personal Touch

You might have a particular stain or paint color in mind. If so, you can choose unfinished RTA cabinets (and save even more money since they are usually cheaper than finished ones), unpack the pieces and stain or paint them at home before assembling them. It’s a lot easier than staining or painting pre-assembled cabinets. Check out this article on painting IKEA furniture.

Easy to Assemble

Maybe not always, but RTA cabinets are usually very easy to assemble. They come with their own fasteners, and sometimes even a tool for tightening them. The holes for the fasteners are even pre-drilled. That last feature should pique the interest of anyone who has tried and failed to align holes in a cabinet they’ve built themselves or mistakenly driven screws at an angle and had them poke out in inconvenient places. I feel your pain.

Follow the Instructions

My carpenter buddy David Runk used to say that he never assembled anything — not even a simple shelf unit — without carefully reading the instructions first. However, in the early days of RTA cabinets, many were shipped from abroad, and the instructions could be confusing. It wasn’t unusual for them to only loosely follow a logical order and to be barely accessible because they were written (or translated) by a company employee whose first language wasn’t English.

These days — and here’s a shout-out to English-as-a-second-lanuage (ESL) teachers worldwide — things are different. Manufacturers generally provide easy-to-understand instructions that include clear illustrations. In fact, IKEA’s diagrammatic instructions transcend language barriers by not having any words at all. To follow most RTA instructions, you simply need the ability to read and to tell right from left and up from down.

• Pro tip: Before I do anything, I always unpack the pieces, check the part numbers and compare them to the materials list in the instructions to make sure I’ve got everything (including all the fasteners). Then I set the parts aside in an orderly way, so I know where they are. Before I learned to do this, I invariably wasted time searching for parts, and more than once, I tried to install a left-hand piece where the right-hand one should go.

Quick Turnaround Times

Custom cabinets can take weeks or months to build, and installation can take longer. Even pre-assembled cabinets can take several weeks to ship, and while you’re waiting for delivery, you have to clear the space where they’re going to go and keep it clear so you don’t waste more time than necessary on the installation.

RTA cabinets are mass-produced, so if you find one you like online or at the store, chances are good it will be in stock. If you buy it at the store, you can take it home and assemble it immediately. If you buy it online, you probably won’t have to wait more than a week for delivery. This speeds up your kitchen renovation project and makes scheduling other phases easier, like the plumbing and electrical work.

Source

• Kitchen Cabinet Kings: RTA Cabinets vs. Assembled Cabinets: Which Are Best?; 2023.