Cabinets

Cabinets are an important part of how a kitchen looks and, to a lesser extent, how it functions. You will probably select your cabinets based on cost and appearance. But aesthetics and function are not totally independent and you will find it useful to review the functional aspects of cabinets before you make your final decisions.

Cabinet Styles

There are two distinctly different cabinet styles: western or face-frame and European or box. In western-style cabinets the front edges of the sides of the cabinet are covered by a ring of wood, the face frame. This ring is missing in European-style cabinets so that the cabinet looks like a box from the front.

Face-frame Cabinets

In a western-style cabinet the face frame is clearly visible around the top and side edges of closed doors. When two cupboards are adjacent, a common face frame piece is used. The width of the face frame varies from one cabinet to another, depending upon the design and manufacturer.

With western-style cabinets, traditional hinge units are visible from the front of the cabinet along the edges of the doors. These hinges are made of thin pieces of metal that mount to the door and to the side of the face frame. Doors open a full 180 degrees and, when open, the cabinet opening is obstructed only by the face frame and the thin metal of the hinge mounting.

The space behind the face frame is useful for storage when shelves don't pull-out. With pull-out shelves, however, this space is lost because shelves must be narrower than the inside of the face frame.

European Cabinets

Without the face frame on which to mount doors, the box cabinet differs in several ways from the face-frame design. Doors are mounted with hinges that mount to the insides of the cabinet behind the doors. The hinges are hidden and the doors don't swing clear of the cabinet opening causing a problem for pull-out shelves.

Cabinet Hinges

As with cabinet styles, the choice of hinge types is very much a matter of personal preference. Here is some background information about hinges to help you make your choice.

There are two general categories of hinges:

Hidden Hinges for Box Cabinets

With box cabinets the doors must be adjusted carefully both for proper operation and for appearance. This is accomplished by using a style of hinge that mounts on the inside of the cabinet wall and which is easily adjustable sideways, in-out, and up-down. This is the European-style hinge.

With this hinge the door part of the hinge fits into a round shallow hole cut into the back of the door. When used on box cabinets, the hinge sticks back about two inches into the cabinet with feet that mount to the wall.

These hinges, while invisible when the doors are closed, are large and very visible when the doors are open.

The hinge pin itself is inside the hole cut into the door. As a result of this construction:

Having the door hinge this way is necessary so adjacent doors on a cabinet don't hit each other (remember that without a face frame, doors on adjacent cupboards are themselves adjacent).

Because the hinge mounts on the inside of the cabinet wall and open doors don't clear the opening, pull-out shelves in European- style cabinets have the same problem as face-frame cabinets--the useful shelf width is noticeably less than the inside width of the cabinet.

There are "double jointed" versions of this hinge that do let doors open all the way. These are larger and even less attractive than the normal hinge--but they are hidden (as long as the doors are closed) and they do let the doors swing open. They are used in places where there are special requirements, such as corner openings for lazy susans.

Hidden Hinges with Face-Frame Cabinets

The knife hinge, used only on face-frame cabinets, has a notch cut in the edge of the door where the hinge is. This arrangement lets the door open fully while still being hidden. (In some cabinets with these hinges, the notch is visible from the front. Done properly, it should not be.) This hinge is invisible, it lets the door open fully, and it does not take up valuable space that may be needed for pull out shelves in deep cabinets. Because of its construction it looks flimsy (particularly when compared with the Mac-truck appearance of the European hinge) and cheap. Hence there is some resistance to using it in expensive cabinets--even though it has functional advantages.

The European-style hinge. You'll see several adaptations of this hinge used on face-frame cabinets:

This last is a lousy design for two reasons:

1.0 The useful front opening of the cabinet is reduced in width by both the face frame and the thickness of the hinges.

2.0 The long side of the European-style hinge juts back behind the face frame leaving an unsightly and useless gap between it and the inside wall of the cabinet.

The result is that pull-out shelves must be even narrower and the unattractiveness of the European-style hinge is accentuated even further. The only good thing that you can say about the arrangement is that the doors are easily removable because the hinges snap together. Cabinetmakers can do a sloppier job with the doors and still use them because of the adjustment capability that is an integral part of the hinge. In other words, they are used for the convenience of the cabinetmaker, not for any benefit to the home user.

This awkward-looking European-style hinge on face frames is frequently used by custom cabinetmakers, but not by pre-manufactured cabinet makers.

There is a serious drawback to all of these European or pseudo-European hidden hinges, whether used in box or face-frame cabinets--they do not open much past straight out (95 to 115 degrees). Even a cursory examination shows that, when they are open as far as they'll go, there's so much leverage at the outside edge of a door that a small child could ruin a door or cabinet by pushing it. For cabinets above a kitchen counter this is more of a nuisance than a problem, but for base cabinets, pantries, or broom closet doors that go all the way to the floor, it is always a danger, particularly with a growing family.

When you're deciding about cabinets, remember that "new" and "in" aren't necessarily better. The older face frame cabinets may well be the best for you--they are certainly more traditional. When used with pull-out shelves, a cabinet with a minimum-width face frame is optimal for maximizing the available space.

Cabinet Exteriors

Cabinet exteriors offer many choices. The first decision is whether to use a wood (natural) finish or to paint them. If a wood finish is chosen, you need to choose the type of wood. Whether painted or stained, the finish color will need to be selected. Generally, cabinets throughout the house are given the same finish but it is a matter of personal preference.

Cabinet exteriors range from plain to decorative. You may prefer finger grooves to open the doors or choose from a variety of hardware pulls.

Soffits

Should the cabinets go all the way to the ceiling? If not, should the space above them (the soffits) be boxed in?

When you are making these decision about boxing in the soffits, there are several things to consider:

1.0 Don't forget the vent for the exhaust fan. If the exhaust system is an updraft unit, it usually vents through a duct going up through the ceiling. This duct work will need to be covered up, either by boxing it in or hiding it with tall cabinets. If the system vents through a wall, there is obviously no duct that needs covering up. (But as a matter of good practice, ducts should be straight without bends to go through walls.)

2.0 Some folks like to have the space above the cabinets as a place to display knick-knacks. Others consider it a dust catcher and prefer that soffits be boxed in.

3.0 When the soffits are boxed in, differently colored paint or wall paper is sometimes used on the wallboard above the cabinets to add a decorative or festive touch to the kitchen.

4.0 A consideration with cabinets that go to the ceiling is that the top shelves are useful only for storing things you almost never need, because you have to use a chair or a ladder to get to them.

Tall Cabinet Doors

Here's a word of caution about very tall cabinets: wood warps and twists. Cabinet doors are no exception and, when they're warped, they are apt to rattle or bang when you close them--and gaping doors are not attractive either. Tall doors are more likely to do this than shorter ones. This problem has been seen in many tracts as well as in custom and spec homes in all price ranges. Some cabinet manufacturers add stiffeners to the inside of tall cabinet doors. These will reduce warping but not twisting. Some cabinet makers put catches on these doors to overcome the effects of warping and twisting. These make opening the doors more difficult and add one more piece of hardware that can malfunction. Tall doors are, more often than not, unsatisfactory.

Cabinet Interiors

Particleboard

Particleboard is used in the cheapest cabinets. If the cabinets are not to be painted, two options are available: 1) a wood grain is printed on the surface or 2) a thin layer of wood is laminated to it. For painted cabinets this isn't necessary and the paint is applied directly to the particle board. Most people cover particle board shelves with a thin plastic lining or even vinyl linoleum to give a surface that can be easily cleaned and maintained. With better-quality cabinets this isn't necessary.

Melamine

Plastic laminate (melamine) is popular for the insides of cabinets and drawers because of its resistance to wear and its ease of cleaning. The basic plastic is the same material used in laminate (Formica) countertops and is glued directly onto the particleboard. Some cabinet makers will paint the shelf edges which doesn't do a particularly good job of covering the particleboard. Others use a vinyl strip that's attached to the shelf.

Usually this plastic is white but colors and even patterns are available. Besides the tough, easy-to-clean aspects of plastic laminate, it is popular with cabinet makers because it is cheaper and it doesn't have to be finished as wood does.

The edges of melamine-clad shelves and interiors should be smooth and clean. In the cheap cabinets seen in many tracts, the edges look like they had been cut with a hatchet.

Wood

Finished wood is found in better cabinets and drawer interiors. Good finishes on interior wood surfaces can be quite durable while poor finishes will stain, become dirty, and be difficult to keep clean. Well-made and finished wooden interiors will always have a richness in appearance that's not possible with plastic.

Backs

How the backs of cabinets are handled speaks loads about their quality. Cheap cabinets won't have a back. They'll have nailing strips for screwing to the wall and that's all. The underlying wallboard is exposed and the whole arrangement looks like it is--cheap. Better cabinets will be backed with the same material as the rest of the interior: wood or melamine. Look for the joints where the cabinet back and the sides meet. In well-made cabinets this joint will be smooth and tight. Sloppily-made cabinets will show definite, unattractive gaps.

Mountings

The nailing strip used to hang cabinets from a back wall is typically wood, plywood, or melamine-coated particle board. In good cabinets the material will have the same surface as the cabinet back and walls so that it matches the rest of the cabinet interior. Particularly for the melamine-coated particle board, this may result in a visible unfinished edge on the nailing strip that should be covered or painted to match the melamine but sometimes is not. The mounting screws used in better cabinets are not visible but are covered by special plastic buttons. (These are inexpensive and easy to use. Good cabinetmakers put them in place when the cabinets are installed. The who-cares installers don't bother. Actually it's something you can do yourself but shouldn't have to.)

Pull-Out Shelves

Center Mullions

Some cabinets have a piece of wood, called a center mullion, mounted vertically up the center of the front opening. The cabinet doors close against this mullion. This design is deadly to the use of pull-out shelves because it means you end up with two much smaller shelves. The mullions are in the way even without pull outs. Except in very wide cabinets, center mullions are used for cosmetic, not practical, reasons. If you're planning on pull-out shelves either initially or you plan to change over to them in the future, DO NOT choose a cabinet design with a center mullion.

In pantries and in other cabinets shelves may be adjustable up and down, they may be pull-out, or they may be fixed in place. When shelves are deep, typically 22 to 24 inches, articles in the back of them are difficult to reach. In these cases, pull-out shelves make a lot of sense. And shelves that are adjustable up and down, whether pull-out or not, also make a lot of sense. (It's not hard to make pull-out shelves adjustable, but you'll probably have to ask for them because cabinet makers don't usually do it.)

The amount of storage space is reduced when shelves are made pull-out because of the room taken by the slide hardware. However, the increased accessibility to the back of deep shelves will usually more than make up for the reduction in shelf width.

But there's more to it than just getting pull-out shelves. In a subdivision that typifies the builder who doesn't pay attention to what his subcontractors do, I saw lots of pull-out shelves! Below the counter, a 30-inch wide cabinet has a pair of double doors on the front. Instead of having the doors simply meet at the center of the cabinet, there is a center mullion some two or three inches wide. The doors close over this. And there are two sets of pull-out shelves in the cabinet, one set behind each door!Even without being pull-out, the shelf's usefulness would be severely limited by the mullion. With the space lost for the two sets of pull-out hardware plus the space taken by the center mullion in front, close to half of the space that should have been available for storage is lost.Beware of pull-out shelves in which the front of the pull-out shelf hardware is not covered. Regardless of how careful you are, sooner or later someone will pull out a shelf without fully opening the cabinet doors. When the front of the pull-out sliders is left uncovered, this will result in gouging the interior finish of a partly-opened door. Some cabinetmakers put a piece of plastic in front of the hardware so that the plastic hits the door first, virtually eliminating the problem. The usual arrangement has the front of the shelf extending out to cover the hardware. But some custom cabinetmakers aren't up to speed on these things. (This problem was seen on both coasts. It's not common but it does happen.)

The simplest pull-out design is just the shelf with slides mounted on each side. These have no sides or backs. Then there are those with fronts, sides, and backs several inches high, looking more like a parts bin in a hardware store than a shelf. These are sometimes called trays. Unless someone is expected to slam them around, there seems little reason for other than minimal front, side and back pieces, if any at all. Such pieces take away from the space available for storage as well as add to the cost. But, again, personal preference should be the determining factor. If you have a choice, get what satisfies you.

While pull-out shelves can usually be added to an existing cabinet, this is not always the case. In some house designs the cabinets are irregularly shaped, making pull-out shelves impossible. Since these are usually deep cupboards, the home users are forever saddled with a large amount of virtually unusable cabinet space.

Lazy Susans

In corners of kitchen cabinets there will often be locations where fixed shelves leave areas that are almost inaccessible. In these cases a lazy-susan type of arrangement is usually appropriate. These are more expensive than fixed shelves but end up providing more useful shelf space. These are available for below-the-counter cabinets in a number of different styles. Lazy susans can also be used in the upper cabinets in kitchens although they're not as popular because the shelves aren't as deep.

An alternative to a lazy susan in the corner is to have a door that is hinged in the middle with one half of the door along each side of the corner. The door then opens up nicely to give reasonable access to the shelves all the way back into the corner. There are four advantages to this arrangement:

Don't forget, however, that to use this approach it is necessary that the opening be large when the doors are opened. A single door on one side of the corner won't do it. There are attractive arrangements where the door and the shelves inside are curved and no special hinges are required to open the door fully.

Be careful of door arrangements, whether for lazy susans or just shelves in the corner, which involve two doors rather than one hinged one. While less expensive, these require that you open and close the doors one after the other. They are not convenient.

Drawer Boxes

ecause cabinet drawers by themselves are similar to uncovered boxes, they are often referred to as drawer boxes.

The sides of drawer boxes may be connected to the fronts and backs of the drawers in two different ways. In one, the pieces are dovetailed, i.e., they are cut and grooved so that they intermesh at the corners. In the other, the pieces are simply butted and then stapled, nailed, or screwed. In all cases the pieces are glued. Dovetailing is "better" in that it has a more handcrafted look and is more expensive. Because of the glue, both approaches are more than sturdy enough for cabinet drawers. In a very expensive house, expect dovetailed drawer boxes; in starter homes expect stapled pieces. It's a matter of cost and taste. Utility doesn't enter into it. (Dove tailing is used only with wood, not with melamine or particleboard.)

Recycling Bins

A trend in cabinetry for today's environmentally conscious society is to have built-in recycling bins for used bottles and cans. They are a convenient amenity if you have room.

But don't do like one custom house I visited where the buyer carried this to the extreme and left out the disposal entirely! What isn't recyclable has its own bin and is carried to the garbage can. For her sake let's hope that when she gets ready to sell her house she can find a buyer who is as enthusiastic about not having a disposal as she was. Getting power under the sink and a switch on the wall isn't that easy after a house has been completed.

Finger Grooves or Knobs?

One of the more annoying things seen in kitchens with wall ovens--microwave or thermal -- is that the doors on the cabinets just above the ovens come down too far. When knobs or handles are used, this is no problem.

When the design uses finger grooves and the doors are too close to the oven, it is annoyingly difficult to get the doors open. The cabinet design should take into account that the top of the oven typically sticks out in front of the cabinet doors so that there must be enough space between door and oven to comfortably insert one's fingers--or use knobs.

Another place that finger grooves are very inconvenient is a bottom drawer where the grooves are only a few inches off of the floor. And cabinet doors above refrigerators are always hard to reach. Knobs or handles are a lot more useful.

The cost of putting knobs on drawers and cabinet doors is small. The inconvenience of not having them goes on a long time. They are always a safe bet if they go with the cabinet style.

Cabinet Bases

Watch out for custom cabinets in which the base, the part of the cabinet that sits on the floor, isn't mitered at the corners. The base is generally 3/4" plywood with a hardwood surface. From the front of the cabinet the un-mitered corners look fine but, if the cabinet is where it can be seen from the end, the view is of the edge of a piece of plywood, not the hardwood surface. Fortunately this sloppy piece of work isn't common but, if it does happen, don't accept it.

Custom versus Pre-manufactured Cabinets

Cabinets may be either pre-manufactured units from a large manufacturer or custom ones from a smaller, usually local, shop. Custom cabinets are generally perceived as more expensive and as of better quality than pre-manufactured units. This may or may not be the case. Actually you pretty much get what you pay for in both custom and pre-manufactured cabinets. Cheap is cheap regardless of who makes them.

One advantage of custom cabinets is that you can get them made exactly to size while pre-manufactured cabinets are available only in predetermined widths (usually 3-inch increments). When you are starting from scratch you can take this into account but when you're working with a kitchen whose dimensions are predetermined, it becomes more of a concern.

Local custom cabinet makers often don't finish the cabinets in their shops. This is done on site after the cabinets are installed. Generally speaking, the conditions for finishing the cabinets on the site are far from ideal. Temperature is not controlled nor is the amount of dust in the air. A principal reason that the small cabinet makers don't finish their cabinets in their shops is that they can't! There are stringent OSHA and environmental protection rules that have to be obeyed and it's expensive to equip a shop to do finishing. The rules don't apply when finishing is done in a house under construction.

The quality of finishing should be about the same regardless of where it is done--if it's done properly. Since there's less likelihood of getting a proper job on the site than in a shop, it's fair to assume that pre-finished cabinets are the better choice if you have an option. (The same logic suggests that advertising which says that "site finished cabinets" are preferable may be misleading.)

You'll find that pre-manufactured cabinets are likely to be of more consistent quality. Some problems seen in custom cabinets, such as not leaving enough space between drawers for fingers, are unlikely to be found in pre-manufactured units. Further, with pre-manufactured cabinets, you can often have an exact preview of what you're getting. With custom manufacturers, you are at their mercy unless you can write out your specs in gruesome detail.

There is another consideration. A couple I know was held up on the completion of their new home for several months while they wrestled with subcontractors who were busy with more important jobs--meaning ones for people who had more clout. With pre-manufactured cabinets this wouldn't have happened.

It is important that the cabinets be installed properly. You have a right to expect this for both custom-made and pre-manufactured units.

A real problem with pre-manufactured cabinets is the question of how to get your kitchen designed properly. Retailers of these cabinets such as kitchen centers, home improvement stores, and larger hardware stores all use computer-aided design (CAD) systems that are impressive and efficient. You come in with your requirements and leave a half hour or so later with a completed kitchen design and a price for the cabinets. But more times than not, that design will be faulty.

Neither the CAD programs nor the training of the designers is directed toward the good kitchen design we are discussing here. Dishwasher, refrigerator, and other problems still occur. It is absolutely up to you to keep them out of your kitchen.