Becky Worley, owner of Classic Cabinetry, says Realtors will tell you, once you get past the front door, the kitchen is typically the number one make or break selling room. Often, the master bedroom will have great impact on a buyer as well, she says. These are both rooms that can benefit tremendously from proper use of cabinetry, Worley says.
“If you are remodeling or getting ready to put your house on the market, sprucing up that kitchen is right after sprucing up the front door in terms of getting people inside the house,” she says. “It’s a remodel that you can get most of your money, if not all of it back, if it is done well.” Worley says she calls kitchens the “living room” now, and she and her designers plan cabinets around televisions in kitchens now as much as they do refrigerators.
She says cabinets also have to blend in with the house, and they can truly make or break a sale. This is why Classic Cabinetry offers a service to Realtors who have a house on the market with a less than satisfying kitchen. The designers at Classic Cabinetry are more than happy to go out and look and offer affordable solutions to the seller for making the rooms in their home more appealing with cabinetry, refinishing, or replacing pulls. The designers can also give those looking for a fixer upper an idea of what needs to be done in homes that need cabinetry remodeling. Worley’s background is in healthcare administration when she decided to go into cabinetry. She had taken drafting in high school instead of home economics, and had enjoyed playing around with the designs. Worley could take a look at a house her husband, a contractor, was going to build and improve on the kitchen. Her cabinetry business beginnings came up again when Worley and her husband were building their own home.
Worley had an idea for what she wanted in her kitchen, and her contractor sent her to a cabinet shop to finalize the cabinetry. She wanted a white kitchen, but was told her options were cherry, oak and alder. After arguing awhile, Worley settled on cabinet designs and specifications she didn’t want. She says she hated the kitchen from day one.
When Worley decided to get out of healthcare administration, she was still intrigued by cabinetry and began attending national kitchen and bath design schools to hone her drafting skills and learn more about the design and specifications in cabinetry. This led to Worley’s opening Classic Cabinetry in 2000 on South Broad Street, where it still stands today.
With Classic Cabinetry, Worley is dedicated to offering her clients the choices she didn’t have when she was picking out cabinets for her home. “When I opened the shop, I knew my goal was to have many choices. I wanted to offer more choices than anybody else so that no one else would be frustrated and you could get exactly what you want,” she says.
To this effect, Worley has five different cabinets lines that offer wood, a combination of wood and other materials, all kinds of doors for cabinets, and in every price range.
She says, “In terms of my price ranges, I can be competitive with the ‘big box stores’ or I can be ridiculously expensive and give you the kitchen of your dreams, and [I can give you] every point in between.”
For those looking to stay environmentally friendly, she even offers bamboo and lyptus materials for cabinetry as well as low formaldehyde plywood. At Classic Cab-inetry, clients work with one designer from start to finish. The designer gets to know the clients, helps them plan traffic flow, storage solutions and goals for their building or remodeling product. They also work with the clients to help them preserve the resale value of their home and to get a classic cabinet design, Worley says. They oversee every step of the process, and all products from Classic Cabinetry have warranties where clients can call Worley if they have an issue.
Worley says her work is a lot of fun because she gets to live vicariously through their clients in the designing of their cabinetry as well as getting to know families and seeing the end result of the projects. Worley says her favorite cabinetry is one that blends into a house and is a great support and design element whichreally feels good when clients get in there with it. “My favorite jobs are kitchens where people come back and say this works great for my family, looks great in the house, and in 20 years, I am going to be just as happy with it as I am now,” she says. Right now is a trying time for the economy, but sometimes those in Chattanooga forget that they are so blessed to not have the problems other parts of the country have had, Worley says. She says she thinks clients sometimes listen to bad news on television so much that they feel down about the economy and will go the cheap route to building and remodeling. This is just exactly what they shouldn’t do, she cautions.
“There’s that pressure for just getting the quick cheap deal, [but] cabinetry is not one of those things you want to go quick and cheap on. It’s one of those things you want to go well with the house and spend the time getting a great design and a great product with some good warranties that will last through the lifetime of the house,” Worley says. She says she also sees a lot of people remodeling right before they sell a house. She recommends if people know they are going to sell in a couple of years to go ahead and remodel so that they can enjoy that time before the sale in a great kitchen or master bedroom for the last couple of years they live there. Worley’s economic advice of the day she says is: “Update it and enjoy it a little while before you put it on the market.”