Purchase Cabinets From Habitat for Humanity-Design New Kitchen

Several years ago a good friend of mine purchased a used home. The kitchen cabinets were constructed from an out of date plastic laminate. I offered to resurface the cabinets; he decided to accept my offer. In the meantime, he and his decided to purchase used cabinets from the local Habitat For Humanity. They had figured out how to design a new kitchen using old cabinets from the Habitat warehouse.


Although I was a little apprehensive about his decision, I decided to still help remodel the old kitchen with the new/old Thermofoil door cabinets he had chosen.

The kitchen looked great when we were finished, but we knew that it was a Heinz 57 mixture. There were slightly different colored white doors and also the raised panel profiles on the doors were not all the same. Only a trained cabinet designers eye could have noticed the differences.

How I Remodeled the Kitchen With Used Cabinets From Habitat From Humanity

Building Cabinets
There were several new cabinets that needed to be built because they could only find the proper sized doors, but there were no boxes with them. There were a few cabinets that I needed to build that we did not have doors for as well.

Ordering Doors
I did have to order a few custom Thermofoil doors to make everything work OK. It was a miracle that I could find the correct profile to match one of the existing styles we were working with. This comes as no surprise though because I was remodeling this kitchen for a Christian pastor.

Altering Cabinets
Some of the cupboards needed to be altered in height or width. This was done using spacers and filler pieces on the inside and outside the boxes. We did end up with a few places where my friend needed to add decorative fillers to fill the gaps that we had created. One of the cabinets was a dead corner base cabinet and they wanted to have an L-shaped corner cabinet instead. I was able to alter the dead corner cabinet and make it into a full corner lazy Susan.

Adding Decorative Fillers
There were several places where decorative fillers were used. For instance, over the sink area, the cabinet that they had found was only 30” wide and we needed 36” of upper cabinet to go in this area. So, we added two three inch wide decorative fillers on either side of the cabinet. The cupboard that we used over the range was too short; we added decorative filler to the bottom of this cabinet as well.

If you’re considering getting cabinets from Habitat For Humanity just remember to be creative. Just because you do not see the exact size you need, take what is available and make a new design out of the old cabinets.

You can create a beautiful kitchen, using Habitat For Humanity Cupboards, if you purchase them after developing a plan that you are sure will work. Words of caution though, don’t jump in unless you have a good working knowledge of how kitchen designs are supposed to work.