Kitchen Remodeling—Kitchen Cabinets

Job building kitchen cabinets on site 

Purchasing factory kitchen cabinets 

Restoring existing kitchen cabinets

If you choose to restore your existing kitchen cabinets it is generally wiser to restore these cabinets by painting them rather than staining them.  Restoring kitchen cabinets by staining is quite difficult as the stain must be applied as a glaze over varnish where it is much more difficult and costly to produce a satisfactory result. On the other hand, with proper detail preparation almost any kitchen cabinets with a good plywood structure can be made to look almost like new if painted by a careful painter.  Houston homes in today’s nicer neighborhoods built after 1960 generally had cabinets built of plywood by quite competent carpenters.  If during paint preparation all surfaces including an open ash grain or raw edges of the plywood behind the cabinet doors are properly prepared, a virtually perfect surface can be achieved.  After new cabinet doors are installed your cooking area cabinets can look like new!

Job building kitchen cabinets on site

The quality of job built kitchen cabinets in Houston or anywhere else can vary widely.  The quality of carpenters throughout any market area and the quality of individual carpenters particularly within a large crew can vary widely.  There are only a few highly experienced quality cabinet makers in Houston today who turn out high quality work.  And because most highly experienced cabinet makers in Houston feel it necessary to run large crews to complete the large custom homes they generally work on, most kitchen cabinets are built by helpers having little experience.  The important question to always ask concerning kitchen cabinets is WHO will build the cabinets:  how many people are involved and what is their individual experience. 

Any experienced contractor can walk through a completed project and tell whether it was built by one experienced carpenter or one experienced carpenter having a large number of helpers.  The detailing is always different and quite apparent to those who understand cabinet quality.  Well constructed kitchen cabinets will almost always take longer to build as they are built by only one or two cabinet makers having many years of experience.  But these custom built cabinets have the significant advantage of being able to accommodate the specific requirements of the room they are built for.

Purchasing factory kitchen cabinets 

The quality of factory kitchen cabinets can vary widely.  And with factory cabinets nothing is truer than the comment “you get what you pay for”.  To the untrained eye the difference at the outset may not be readily apparent.  But as you live with them and use them, the quality or lack thereof will become quite apparent.  When you sell your home the purchaser at that time will be able to readily see the difference as over time lower cost cabinets will not hold up under daily use.

Replacing all the cabinets in a kitchen is never an inexpensive enterprise.  Plus all other elements in a kitchen such as countertops, appliances, flooring etc. are also not inexpensive. And it remains a fact that a complete kitchen remodel which involves removing all cabinets is seldom completed in an inexpensive home, it follows then that it is never wise to install poorly built factory cabinets in your kitchen as it may devalue your home and your investment will be wasted.  GOOD factory cabinets are a great investment. But if budget is the compelling consideration it is much better to choose job built cabinets built by a good cabinetmaker with a great reputation and whose work you have verified.  A good cabinetmaker unlike a vendor of inexpensive factory cabinets will build quality cabinets which will never lose their value as they will hold up under many years of use.

THE WOODMARK WAY on Job Built Kitchen Cabinets

Woodmark’s main cabinetmaker has 32 years of experience.  His father was a lifelong trim carpenter and cabinetmaker.  The father of Woodmark’s owner was also a lifelong carpenter and cabinetmaker.  The result is as it would seem to be:  Woodmark Kitchen and Bath has always emphasized cabinet quality.   

Woodmark job builds all types of cabinets:  face frame, full overlay, those with inset doors and all others.  The price of our kitchen which includes them does not vary substantially from one type to the other.  We build what you feel you will most enjoy.

Painted cabinets.

The base cabinet and wall cabinet “boxes” are made of ¾” birch plywood.  The backs of all upper wall cabinets are made of ¼” birch plywood.  The face frames (the part the doors are hung from) are made of solid poplar or maple—no veneered plywood.  Each piece is cut to fit the kitchen cabinets and the kitchen space.  The top surface of the cabinet is covered with BC plywood.  Cabinet door and drawer faces are made by a door manufacturer, Evans Cabinets and Doors in Brenham , Texas , to specifically accommodate the measurements of the created cabinet and are made of birch or maple in a style chosen by you.  They are installed to cover almost the entire face of the cabinets leaving in most instances a 1/8” space between door pairs or stacks of drawers.  All doors are installed with an adjustable hidden Blum or equal hinge.  The finished cabinet is plumb, level, tight and crisp.

Stained cabinets

The base cabinet and wall cabinet “boxes” are made of ¾” wood of a type you select.  The backs of all upper wall cabinets are made of ¼” wood of a type you select.  The face frames are made of solid wood of a type you select—no veneered plywood.  Each piece is cut to fit the kitchen cabinets and kitchen space.  The top surface of the cabinet is covered with BC plywood. Cabinet door and drawer faces are made by a door manufacturer, Evans Cabinets and Doors in Brenham , Texas , to specially accommodate the measurements of the created cabinet and are made of a matching wood in a style chosen by you.  They are installed to cover almost the entire face of the cabinets leaving in most instances a 1/8” space between door pairs or drawer stacks.  All doors are installed with an adjustable hidden Blum or equal hinge.   The finished cabinet is plumb, level, tight and crisp.

The height of your kitchen cabinets can be of your choosing.  Kitchen cabinet finished tops are normally 36” above your finished floor, but in recent years many have been raised to 37”, 38” or more. It is entirely up to you.

Cabinet doors are made such that they appear to be one solid piece of wood but in reality include a picture frame with solid wood in the center that is allowed to move within the frame to prevent warping. 

Storage within cabinet drawers created by Woodmark is optimum.  Each drawer in a drawer stack is constructed such that it may be stacked one on top of the other with no space in between.  Also all drawers have full extension drawer slides such that all contents in the back of each drawer are easily accessible.  If you calculate the difference in storage volume between our method and the more common one where each drawer had a divider as much as 2” wide above and below it and then is allowed to be extended only two-thirds of the way out, you will come up will an increased storage volume of our drawers of almost double the common one.
 

All types of available wood are allowed with generally no difference in price on stained cabinets.  We generally use cherry, alder, maple and birch. 

Rubber bumpers 1/16” thick are installed on all cabinet drawers and rubber bumpers 1/8” thick are installed on all cabinet doors to reduce noise and damage to door facings.