In today’s post we will talk about hinges and the difference between a high end hinge and an imported hinge. The hinge we use at Cabinets Quick is the Blum, a soft closing hinge that has a little switch to turn on and off the soft close function. This is called an inserta hinge and is useful when putting in on a door. It has no screws because painters need to take on or off the door for finishing and those trades end up ruining the screw or misplacing the screw. This causes many complications down the road when the door needs to be put back on.
Visually Blum hinge is much more refined and finished. Nevertheless both hinges function the same way, they both have soft closing. So the question is why would you spend three times more for the Blum hinge over the economy hinge. The basic answer is application, the economy hinges do serve a purpose for higher production runs like hotels, apartments or commercial work and when cost is a factor – the economy hinge works well for that application.
For high-end cabinetry the refinement and some of the sophistication you get with a Blum hinge do show through and is generally called for high end cabinetry.
If a job was price sensitive and needed to be streamlined using the off brand hinges is perfectly fine. Both hinges come with a lifetime guarantee, and the reason why they came with a lifetime guarantee is because nothing ever happened to the hinge after the door is placed, unless the door is abused, the hinge would work just fine for the life of the cabinet.
The other thing many unscrupulous dealers or vendors do is they’ve been charging for soft-close. Soft-close in our industry now is standard or default. If the doors are not soft closing and the vendor is charging for an up-charge that is kind of a red flag. We have seen many vendors charge more for the soft close option, that shouldn’t really be happening. Soft close hinges have become a standard part of cabinets.