Every kitchen consultation in the GTA lands on the same question around the forty-minute mark. "So should we just do IKEA?" Followed by, maybe thirty seconds later, "or should we go all in on custom?"
We install all three tiers — IKEA SEKTION, semi-custom from Kraftmaid and Fabritec and Cabico, and full shop-built custom — and each one is the right answer for a specific kind of homeowner. This post is the honest framework for figuring out which one you are. For the broader picture on where cabinets sit inside a full kitchen budget, see what a full GTA kitchen renovation costs in 2026 line by line.
First — a category nobody talks about. The cabinet box (the actual carcass behind the door) is a genuinely boring product in 2026. A 3/4-inch plywood or thick MDF box with a melamine interior, Blum soft-close drawer slides, and a concealed Blum hinge on the door is basically the same thing at every tier once you get past the true big-box disposable stuff.
What you're actually paying for when you move up tiers is door quality, finish quality, modularity, repairability, and the degree to which the design can handle a house that isn't square. Those four things are where the money goes, and they matter in different amounts depending on your house and how you live.
IKEA SEKTION — the honest case
IKEA SEKTION with their stock doors installed runs $9,000 to $14,000 CAD on a mid-size GTA kitchen in 2026. The same SEKTION boxes with nice custom doors from Semihandmade, Reform, or a local shop runs $14,000 to $22,000. That's the cheapest full-tier cabinet install we can stand behind. Below IKEA, you're either looking at big-box contractor cabinets that we won't install (we've torn out too many) or reusing existing boxes with refaced doors, which is a separate conversation.
What IKEA does well: boxes are 3/4-inch particleboard with a melamine laminate, Blum hinges are standard, drawer slides are Blum TANDEM soft-close, and the 25-year warranty is real. The hardware is exactly what ships in an $18,000 semi-custom kitchen.
Modularity is a real strength — every SEKTION cabinet is a standard module that can be swapped or relocated in year six if the kitchen layout starts to feel wrong. IKEA also updates the interior fittings every five years, which means you can actually upgrade the drawer organizers and pull-outs ten years later without ripping out the boxes.
What IKEA does badly: the doors. Stock IKEA doors look like stock IKEA doors. They're fine — there's nothing wrong with them — but there's also nothing notable about them. The fillers and end panels are the other weakness, because IKEA is a module system and module systems don't love houses with walls that aren't plumb.
On an old Kerr Village bungalow in Oakville where the kitchen wall bows 3/8-inch across ten feet, a stock SEKTION run will end up with a visible gap or a messy scribe. The fix is a proper filler panel that we build on site, which adds a few hundred bucks to the labor but isn't dramatic. The other fix is buying your doors from Semihandmade, which comes with proper scribe panels designed for this.
- Stock IKEA SEKTION with IKEA doors: $9,000 to $14,000 installed on a mid-size GTA kitchen
- SEKTION with Semihandmade or Reform custom doors: $14,000 to $22,000 installed
- Blum TANDEM drawer slides and Blum hinges ship standard with SEKTION
- Modularity is the real strength — swap cabinets later without demolishing
- 25-year warranty on boxes, real in the GTA
- Weakness: stock doors, fillers, and out-of-square walls need extra labor
Semi-custom — Kraftmaid, Fabritec, Cabico, and the sensible middle
Semi-custom cabinets from brands like Kraftmaid, Fabritec, Cabico, and Decor Cabinets run $22,000 to $36,000 CAD installed on the same mid-size kitchen. The boxes are still factory-built but with more size flexibility — 1/8-inch increments instead of the 3-inch increments IKEA ships in. You can order a 17 1/4-inch cabinet if that's what fits between a wall and a window. Doors come in dozens of profiles and finishes and land at a noticeably higher quality than IKEA stock. This is where most of our mid-range kitchen renovations live in 2026.
The thing semi-custom handles that IKEA doesn't is the long tail of kitchen awkwardness — appliance garages, pull-out spice drawers next to the range, 12-inch trash pullouts, banquette seating cabinets, weird-angle corner units. Most of those exist in IKEA's catalog too but in fewer sizes and with fewer finish options, so you end up fighting the limitations on a reno that has 14 feet of uppers, 18 feet of base, an island, and three appliance integrations. Semi-custom gives you a catalog that solves most of those instead of a catalog that makes you pick which compromise to live with.
Where semi-custom gets less honest is the lead times and the order-error rate. Kraftmaid orders out of the US typically run 6 to 10 weeks in 2026, and about one order in every eight comes in with at least one wrong piece — wrong door, wrong size, wrong finish, wrong hardware.
That's not Kraftmaid's fault specifically, it's semi-custom industry-wide, and the working mitigation is building two weeks of slack into the schedule and having us walk every cabinet box before install. Fabritec and Cabico are both Canadian-made and tend to have shorter lead times (4 to 7 weeks) and slightly fewer order errors in our experience, which is why we default to them for tight-schedule jobs.
- Kraftmaid, Fabritec, Cabico, Decor Cabinets — installed $22,000 to $36,000
- 1/8-inch size increments solve awkward kitchen geometry
- Broader finish and door-profile catalog than IKEA
- Full range of pull-outs, spice drawers, appliance garages, angled corners
- Lead times 4 to 10 weeks depending on brand and season
- Order error rate roughly 1 in 8 — always inspect before install day
Full custom shop-built — when it's worth paying for
Full custom shop-built cabinets on a mid-size GTA kitchen run $36,000 to $70,000 CAD installed in 2026. We work with a cabinet shop in Brampton that has been building for our jobs since 2019 and has a lead time of 5 to 8 weeks. They build boxes from 3/4-inch Baltic birch plywood, use Blum hardware, finish doors in a dust-free booth, and build every run to the exact dimensions of the specific kitchen. A custom run has no fillers, no standard modules, no compromises on weird corners — the cabinet is made for the room.
The honest reasons to go custom are: your house is old and nothing is square, your design has a specific detail that doesn't exist in any catalog (a full-height library unit with a hidden coffee station, a waterfall-faced banquette, a 48-inch slab-door pantry with integrated lighting), or you simply want the finish quality of shop-sprayed doors that a factory finish doesn't match.
The less-honest reason — the one we gently push back on — is "we just want it to look nicer." If your kitchen is a rectangular footprint with a normal island, Cabico semi-custom in a painted white inset door will look identical to shop-built custom in the same profile, and cost $12,000 less.
Where custom really earns its premium is the seventy percent of a kitchen that isn't doors. Inset framing (where the door sits flush inside the face frame instead of overlaying it) is shop-built territory — semi-custom inset is available but much more expensive, and IKEA doesn't do it at all. Flush-wall cabinetry (where the cabinet sides are finished as the wall rather than butted up against drywall) is only achievable with custom.
And the old-house problem — walls that bow 3/8-inch, floors that slope 5/8-inch, corners that aren't square — is where custom pays back the hardest, because a good cabinet shop builds every run to the actual measured room, not to a catalog size. For a deeper dig on working with these old houses, see our writeup on scribing trim in old Ontario houses.
The things that stay the same across all three tiers
Blum hardware ships in all three tiers — the TANDEM drawer slides and BLUMotion soft-close hinges on a $14,000 IKEA kitchen are the same hardware going into a $60,000 custom kitchen. That's worth knowing because it's the part you touch every day, and it's the part that fails first on cheaper cabinet lines from big-box stores. If a contractor quotes you a cabinet line that isn't Blum, Hafele, or Grass for the drawer and hinge hardware, assume the drawers will start sticking in year four.
The other thing that stays the same is the install labor. A kitchen with 22 linear feet of cabinets and an island takes three to four days to install regardless of which tier the boxes came from. We charge the same labor per foot across all three tiers because it's the same work — level the boxes, shim the bases, screw them together, scribe the fillers, and hang the doors. What changes is the product cost, not the install cost.
“We walked in wanting custom. You talked us down to Cabico semi-custom and we saved fourteen grand and the kitchen still looks incredible. Thank you for being honest.”
Our default recommendation for the average GTA renovator is semi-custom. It covers the vast majority of kitchen geometry, delivers a finish most homeowners can't distinguish from full custom, and lands at a price that leaves room in the budget for nicer counters or appliances. IKEA is right if the budget is genuinely tight or the kitchen is simple. Full custom is right if your house is old or your design is unusual. There's a right answer for every kitchen in this province — it just isn't the same answer for every kitchen. If you want us on the job, kitchen renovations is where we take the lead.
