The Importance of Select Grade Wood for Cabinet Doors

If you are having real wood cabinets manufactured by a custom cupboard manufacturing shop make sure the doors are made from select grade hard wood. The importance of this is crucial. If you are not concerned about color variations, then don’t worry about telling your fabricator that you want your kitchen, bathroom or office cabinetry doors to be select grade, quality hard wood.

We used to order a lot of maple cabinet doors in our shop and our local door manufacture in South Florida would always ask if we wanted a paint grade maple or better selection. At that time many of the hardwood maple cabinet doors were getting painted solid white or off white. The paint grade obviously had a lot of discolored grain in the wood. It did not matter because the paint colors were always opaque.

If we were going to have a clear coat or stain on the doors, where the grain would show through, we would always order select hard wood.


If you want your cabinet door’s natural colors to be consistent in coloration, then you must tell your manufacture that you want your cabinet doors to be built out of select grade cherry wood, mahogany, walnut, oak or maple. If you don’t make it very clear to them that you want color consistency in the kitchen cabinet doors, then you will end up with many variations of wood tones on all of the doors.

At the same time that you would like to have your doors be matched in color, you will also have to be open-minded by understanding that you are working with nature here and colors vary. Now, if there is a slight difference in the hard woods colors you should be lenient and accept them, but if there is a drastic noticeable difference in wood tones, then I say the cabinet company should replace the doors.

Please hear me out on this point, you must tell your cabinet maker that you want your door colors to not have a lot of noticeable variations in color. I cannot reiterate the importance of doing this enough. If at all possible get them to confirm your request in writing. If they say that they cannot do it, I’d consider finding a company who can. Be prepared to spend a little extra to get better quality results.

A quality cabinet manufacturing company who deals with hard woods a lot shouldn’t have a problem with your request.

For cabinet fabricators who order their wood doors from door manufactures, it’s important for them to pass the information on to the door company. This must be done when the order is placed.

You must tell them and never assume that the sales person you are working with will order select grade kitchen or bathroom cabinet doors. Make your request clearly know.

If you never make it clear to your kitchen cabinet supplier that you want select wood doors on your cabinets, with very little variations in coloration, then you will pretty much be stuck with whatever you get.

The importance of ordering select grade real wood for your kitchen or bathroom vanity cabinet doors should be expressed over and over to your sales person. This way if there is a problem, they will not be able to act like you never requested to have all of the wood tones matched.

It’s important to understand that I am talking about having custom cabinets fabricated. If you are ordering your cabinets from a large home center, you will be stuck with whatever you order. Unless there is a big difference in the kitchen cabinet door colors, you’re not going to be able to exchange cupboard doors that have differing colors.