Custom Cabinets- What makes a good cabinet?

There are a lot of different definitions of what custom cabinets are, to me custom has always meant a unit built specifically for the customer, their needs and style. This includes building a cabinet to actually fit the space while minimizing the pieces needed to do that. Many places will sell you a set of cabinets that will be made up of premade sizes, for instance to fill an 8 foot 2 1/2-inch space, they will use for instance a 36" cabinet in the center and a 30" cabinet on either side, then finish it to the wall using a 1 1/4-inch filler strip on either side, leaving a total of four seams where everything is screwed together. When we build a cabinet to fit an 8-foot 2/1/2 space we will build the cabinet to about 8 foot 3 inches or a little more then cut it to fit wall to wall on site, then we will apply caulk and cabinet paint to give it the perfect look. Another thing to consider is the quality of the materials used, most cabinet shops use 1/2" material for the boxes of the cabinets, it can be wood core veneer, particle board core, or MDF core. Particle board is basically a type of ground wood product that is then held together using different resins to bond it and make it fairly rigid, it is not ideal for areas with wet or damp locations, MDF is made by breaking down hardwood, or softwood fibers and combine it with wax and resin binders to make a dense product to which hardwood veneers are attached, again not ideal for damp or wet locations. If you think of kitchens and bathrooms, they are areas with higher humidity and exposure to moisture, through steam, splashes, and spills. One of the things I have seen quite a bit of in the past several years are the ends of cabinet and refrigerator boxes delaminating and swelling up at the bottoms from mopping your floors, this is because the MDF and particle board will wick moisture up into them and cause the substrate to break down and swell up, leaving an unsightly rough, swollen look to the cabinets. We use 3/4 wood core veneer plywood, made up of thin layers of solid wood glued up with a hardwood veneer, we think it is the best product, because you have a wood core, it is not as prone to wicking water in, it holds the screws and nails necessary to build the cabinets much better, and it holds up better to the daily wear and tear of kitchen use. We use a domestic plywood as well, because we feel the industry is better regulated here, and we feel it is important to support business's here in the U.S. The bottom line to all this is we understand this is a big investment in your home, and we take that very seriously, we want to give you a product that we believe will give you the best look and still be what we consider to be the most durable! So, to sum it all up, what type of custom do you want? One that is designed by putting certain size boxes together to fill your space. or one that is custom tailored to fit not only the space, but your specific needs for the space? Hopefully this has answered some questions and given you a better idea of why we build our cabinet's the way we do!

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