Kitchen Cabinets & Cabinet Installation

Cabinets do three jobs at once. They hold everything, they are most of what you see, and they set the dimensions the countertop, appliances and backsplash all work to. Get them right and the rest of the kitchen follows. Get them wrong and every later decision is a compromise around the mistake.

Start with the boxes

Showrooms sell door styles. The part that decides whether a kitchen survives is the box behind the door.

Plywood boxes hold screws, tolerate a leak under the sink and stay square when they are carrying a stone top. Particleboard and MDF boxes are cheaper and can be perfectly acceptable in a low-traffic run, but the sink base is where they fail: one slow supply-line drip and the bottom panel swells and delaminates. If you are choosing one place to spend more, the sink base is it.

Look at how the box is joined. Dowels and glue with corner blocking is solid. Staples into the edge of a particleboard panel is not. Then look at the back panel, because a thin back with a hanging rail is what actually carries an upper cabinet full of dishes.

Drawers

Drawer construction is the clearest quality signal available to you in a showroom. Dovetailed solid-wood drawer boxes on full-extension, soft-close undermount slides will still work perfectly in fifteen years. Stapled boxes on side-mount roller slides will sag, and you will feel the difference every day.

Full extension matters more than it sounds. A three-quarter extension slide leaves the back six inches of the drawer permanently under the counter, which is where things go to be forgotten.

Face-frame or frameless

Face-frame cabinets have a hardwood frame across the front of the box. It is the traditional American construction, it gives hinges something substantial to attach to, and it suits houses with visible trim and moldings, which is most of the older housing stock in Essex and Union County.

Frameless, sometimes called full-access or European, has no front frame. The door covers the whole box, drawers can be slightly wider, and the look is flush and contemporary. In a small kitchen the extra usable width per cabinet adds up.

Neither is inherently better built. A well-made frameless cabinet beats a poorly made face-frame one and vice versa.

Doors, drawer fronts and finishes

Door style is where a kitchen gets its character. Shaker remains the default because it sits comfortably in almost any house, from a 1920s colonial to a 1970s split-level. Flat-panel slab doors read modern and show fingerprints on darker finishes. Raised-panel and beaded inset are more traditional and more expensive to make.

Inset doors, where the door sits flush within the frame rather than overlaying it, are beautiful and unforgiving. They need a cabinet built to tight tolerances and they move with seasonal humidity. In an unconditioned or humid space they will need adjustment.

On finish: painted cabinets show wear at the edges and around handles over time, but they can be touched up and eventually repainted. Stained wood hides wear better and is far harder to change your mind about later. Thermofoil is durable and inexpensive but can delaminate with heat, so keep it away from an unshielded oven or toaster.

Storage that gets used

Most kitchens have enough cubic feet and the wrong shape of them. A few changes make a disproportionate difference:

• Drawers instead of lower doors. A deep drawer bank for pots is far more usable than a base cabinet you have to kneel and reach into.
• A corner solution. A blind corner cabinet without a pull-out swallows whatever goes into it. A lazy Susan or a blind-corner pull-out recovers that space.
• A pull-out beside the range for oils and spices, which keeps the counter clear.
• Uppers to the ceiling in a room with height, with the top shelf for things you use twice a year. The alternative is a dust ledge above the cabinets.
• A dedicated pantry cabinet with roll-out shelves, which in a house with no pantry closet is often the highest-value single cabinet in the kitchen.
• A tray divider above the fridge or oven, because that cabinet is otherwise the least usable in the room.

Installing cabinets in an old house

This is where cabinet work in this area is different from cabinet work in new construction. In a house built in the 1920s or 1930s, walls bow, floors slope, and corners are not ninety degrees. The cabinets still have to end up level and plumb, because the countertop and the appliances depend on it.

That means starting from the highest point of the floor and working from a level line, shimming every base cabinet independently, and then closing the resulting gaps with scribe molding cut to follow the wall. Filler strips go between cabinet runs and at walls so doors and drawers have room to open without binding on trim or on each other.

Uppers get hung off solid framing, not into drywall with anchors, which sometimes means adding blocking while the wall is open. A cabinet run loaded with dishes is heavy, and a stone countertop is heavier.

The visible tell of an installation done properly is boring: doors line up, gaps are even, nothing binds, and there is no wedge of daylight behind the crown molding.

Hardware and hinges

Soft-close is standard now and worth having. Concealed European hinges are adjustable in three directions, which is how a good installer gets a long run of doors to line up on a wall that is not straight. Knobs and pulls are the cheapest way to change how a kitchen feels and can be swapped later, so it is not a decision to agonize over.

One practical note: pull size should match drawer width. A three-inch pull on a thirty-inch drawer front looks undersized and gives you a poor grip on a drawer full of cookware.

How cabinets fit the rest of the project

Cabinets sit in the middle of the sequence and constrain everything on either side of them.

Before: the layout has to be settled, appliances have to be specified because the openings are built to them, and any plumbing or electrical that moves has to be roughed in and inspected. Flooring may go down first if it runs wall to wall.

After: countertops are templated once the cabinets are installed and confirmed level, never before. Then the sink and faucet, then the backsplash, then undercabinet lighting, then trim and hardware.

An island is cabinetry too, and it has its own requirements. It has to be anchored to the floor, and any power or plumbing in it has to be roughed in before the flooring goes down.

What drives cabinet cost

• Linear feet. Cabinets are priced per box, so the length of the run is the base number.
• Stock versus semi-custom versus custom, which is the widest spread in the whole kitchen budget.
• Box material. Plywood construction costs more than particleboard and is worth it at the sink.
• Door style and finish. Painted inset costs considerably more than an overlay slab.
• Interior fittings. Pull-outs, dividers, corner mechanisms and trash pull-outs each add up.
• Modifications. Reduced depth, non-standard height, or a box built around a chimney chase.
• Installation complexity, which in a very out-of-square old house is real additional labor.

Cabinet work across our service area

Cabinet installation is part of nearly every kitchen we do, in Maplewood colonials with plaster walls, Newark two-families with tight galley kitchens, and Livingston splits where the room is square and the work is straightforward. See all service areas, or go back to kitchen remodeling.

Every town has its own kitchen remodeling page covering the housing there and what it means for a project. See the full service area.