When my family decided we needed another update in our house I gave them the choice of the kitchen, the basement, or the third floor (which we call the ?rec room?). Since we had recently remodeled one of our bathrooms, we decided to take that one off the list from the beginning. We talked over each room and concluded this: the basement would be a great place to have a lounge or bar type set up, we could entertain guests, play cards or other games, watch football on Sunday and have a party place. Next the third floor could be converted from the attic into a quiet retreat where family members could get away to read or relax. Finally we talked about the kitchen and it made the most sense of the three options. We use the kitchen everyday; we meet there, cook there, dine there, and pass through it on the way to the outside world. It was the logical choice to renovate the kitchen.

After traveling to the local home building supply store I realized that maybe we should have went with one of the other choices. The cost of renovating the kitchen was double or triple of the other projects. The big cost was the kitchen cabinets and the kitchen appliances. I thought there had to be another way to get these products and not spend so much money.

I called a friend who has been rehabbing houses for years and he said let me in on a contractors secret. He said ?are you handy and ready to have some fun?? I of course replied yes and was eagerly waiting for an answer when he showed me the trick was right there on my laptop. He said go online and shop for RTA kitchen cabinets. These RTA products will save you thousands of dollars on your kitchen renovation. I was so excited that I forgot to ask what RTA meant. I later found out that RTA is not a brand name, but instead it meant ?ready to assemble?. For instance, you buy a ready to assemble kitchen cabinet, put it together and then you have the same product that you would have paid for anyway. In other words, you save money buying a product that requires a little bit of your on work, but as any good ?do it yourself? person knows, your saving money and that is the whole idea.

So we jumped online found many different RTA kitchen cabinet websites and believe it or not, the prices were almost half of what I was finding in retail stores! I was really going to save thousands of dollars. Here all this time, the online resource was right at my finger tips. My contractor friend explained that this is how he increases his profit margin by almost fifty percent! He buys these RTA kitchen cabinets, saves the money and then charges his customers the price of an assembled product. Its genius and it is now saving me money on my new house project.

Finally I said to my friend, ?what about the kitchen appliances?? He said, that is for the next article.