Are you thinking about new kitchen cabinets, a kitchen remodel, or a new kitchen addition? Or maybe you’re considering new cabinets in your bathroom, family room, or any other space you want a built-in? It is tough to know where to start. This post will answer your questions and give you clarity on the steps involved to get new cabinets.
The first step is to draw the interior of your home like the example above. This means drawing the wall that the cabinets will go on and all the context around that wall like the windows, beams, heating ducts, door trim, lighting, and any other system that may have some sort of impact on that wall. This drawing is called an interior elevation, and someone needs to draw it. This is where you have two options.
Option 0: ask a cabinet shop to draw the interior elevation for you. The cabinet supplier has a rep that will come and measure the wall (and only the wall), and they will draw that “rectangle” into their proprietary software. If they are good, they will even measure the location of the stuff on that wall like outlets and switches. In their proprietary software (made to help them sell cabinets), they will select a few products for cabinet sizes that might fit on your wall, and the computer pops some cabinet boxes on your wall (and none of the other context like beams or lights on the ceiling or adjacent window trim that may align with your cabinets). They will show you a 3D view that their software spits out, it will look cool, and you will be like, “cool, let’s buy some cabinets.” Then the cabinets show up, they get screwed to the wall, and you have an off-white rectangular drywalled surface with cabinets attached to it - and that is pretty much it. It will have none of the trim or integration with the rest of the house as shown in the example drawing above.
The cabinets won’t fit perfectly on the wall. There will be gaps between the cabinets and your window trims (leaving tiny gaps of drywall leftover that look like someone couldn’t figure out how to make everything fit together). There will be no relationship to your lighting. There will be no relationship to any beams, ducts, or other items on your ceiling that should have ideally been centered on your cabinets. Your refrigerator will likely stick out several inches beyond your countertop. You will have big empty gaps of space next to your refrigerator, there will be gaps above your cabinets and below your ceiling. Your upper cabinets won’t line up with the windows or doors that are next to them.
In other words, your kitchen will be like a hodge podge of various items that have no relationship to each other. It would be almost like someone tried to sell you something as quickly as possible without considering any of the other items they aren’t responsible for. Oh wait. That is what they did. They literally had no idea, or sense, or care for any of the things outside of their scope, so they just sell you stuff without any consideration for anything other than themselves.
It’s like being sold a pair of shoes without the shoe salesman asking what size shoe you wear or what you need the shoes for. “Here you go. These size 10 loafers will be great!” says the salesmen. “But I’m a size 8, and these are for my soccer game,” says the customer. Don’t buy ill-fitting dress shoes for a soccer game:) Ensure the cabinets are designed for your situation. That brings us to the other option for those of us who want to spend our money on things that fit.
Option 1: Design the cabinets with someone who has control AND responsibility to ensure they work with the items around them. This is where an architect comes in. An architect has control over figuring out where everything in your project gets built, and they have a responsibility to ensure it all gets built properly - not just the cabinets. This is why architects are not allowed to receive financial gain from the sale of a certain product. Architects must be responsible for the big picture and not a solo transaction.
The architect will review a cabinet order (known as the “shop drawing”) from a cabinet supplier over and over again until it fits properly within the room, and the architect will request revisions to the cabinet order as many times as necessary until every cabinet fits with everything else in that room (and beyond). The architect will check with the structural engineer to ensure the beams that integrate above the cabinets will fit and align with the cabinets. The architect will check the lighting layout to ensure the lights center in the middle of certain cabinets. The architect will work with the general contractor to ensure the ducting for the heating system and vent hood fits with the cabinets. The architect will check the heights of adjacent windows and doors and their corresponding trim pieces to ensure those trims and crown molding relate well to the cabinets they abut. In other words, the architect has a duty to ensure everything works together, the architect wants it to work together, and the architect will fight to ensure it all works together.
The architect is the person responsible for the whole project, so it makes sense that the architect would orchestrate the process of ordering cabinets. This process starts by the architect drafting an interior elevation of where the cabinets go, where doors and drawers go, where appliances go, and where other systems go. There is an example of this type of drawing at the top of this article. The architect next will give that interior elevation drawing to the builder, and the builder will coordinate them with the cabinet supplier that they have a good working relationship with. The builder will often get a volume discount that they can pass along to the client. The cabinet supplier will next create something known as a “shop drawing” as shown in the example below. This is a drawing created with the proprietary software that inputs the cabinet boxes at the exact sizes offered by that manufacturer. Because this is being orchestrated by the architect, the architect will ensure the shop drawings consider any obstacles or ancillary items that affect the cabinets. The architect will check the shop drawings over and over until the rep can get everything to fit into the required conditions. The rep commonly has no idea why they are being asked to change the size of cabinets a few inches or fractions of inches each time as the architect and builder work together to review and re-review the shop drawings, but nonetheless, the architect is ensuring the cabinets will work with all the jobsite conditions that a cabinet supplier could not possibly be privy to. The architect is on the client’s side and wants to ensure everyone properly coordinates with one another, and the architect is the only person who could possibly do that since they are the only ones with the knowledge and control of all the other systems that affect the cabinets.
The process of getting cabinet shop drawings from a cabinet supplier all starts with the initial interior elevations that the architect draws to show the design intent. These interior drawings show the shape of each wall with all the things on it, and the walls are not just simple rectangles like the cabinet suppliers tend to assume. Instead, the interior elevations include all the trim and other items that will eventually abut the cabinets. These are items that the cabinet supplier doesn’t sell or care about, so when the cabinet supplier takes the architect’s interior elevation to create a shop drawing, they usually only draw the cabinets on it (and nothing else). So, the architect needs to cross-check the dimensions of the cabinets from the shop drawings will work with the other relevant items that are excluded from shop drawings. There are inevitably adjustments that need to be made, so the architect “redlines” the shop drawings to cross out and alter items that need to be updated to coordinate with the conditions of the space. Often, these conditions were already laid out on the interior elevations provided to the cabinet supplier, but they often get ignored, misunderstood, or miscalculated when the supplier inputs their data into their proprietary software. Often, the cabinet supplier just goes off and changes stuff because they think it will “look cool” (without actually understanding the impacts those changes would have on other systems). The architect needs to bring them back down to this planet and tell them something like, “we need the cabinets laid out like we included in the original drawings because of the lighting layout, structural beam intersections, and the vent duct which the client has already reviewed and approved over the past few months. Please don’t alter the plan unless we ask for it. We really just need to buy cabinets in the configuration requested.”
For a cabinet supplier, it is all about the dimensions. “How big is each cabinet” is what they want to know. This might seem like an easy question to answer, but there are many nuances to it once you get into the fine details of all the other things that affect the cabinetry. For example, if a wall is 8’ long, and there’s going to be 4 equally sized cabinets on it, then you would think, each cabinet is 2’ wide, right? 2x4=8?
Wrong. The context matters. Maybe on an adjacent wall that is perpendicular to this 8’ wall example there is a refrigerator. How far does the refrigerator stick out? Will the cabinet drawers pull out and ram into the refrigerator? Is the wall really 8’? Is it actually possible to perfectly fit four cabinets 2’ wide each onto an 8’ wall? With construction tolerances, something won’t fit. The cabinet supplier and architect need to consider all of these things. The cabinet supplier is less likely to know anything about the contextual issues that may come up.
Another issue that commonly comes up is how existing conditions in an existing home affect the measurements of cabinets. Within an existing space that will later be remodeled or altered, the wall that the cabinets will go on has not yet been built, so it’s not possible to measure it yet. The design intent might be to fit a bank of cabinets between THIS and THAT. If THIS and THAT are not yet built, it’s hard to measure it to the level of accuracy required. This is where it’s important for the general contractor (who has responsibility for building the stuff that the cabinets must fit within) to layout all of the plumbing, beams, trim, intervening walls, appliance locations, etc that will affect the cabinets, and the general contractor must do this comprehensive planning BEFORE anything gets built.
For example, a general contractor may need to bring a plumber on site to determine how and where the drain line will fit around the existing conditions, and that drain line needs to fit within a wall that is not yet built. With the guidance from the plumber, the general contractor can layout the future wall location, determine the thickness of the wall with its drywall and any other surface finishes, and the space that is leftover is where cabinets can fit. This gets down to fractions of inches. The cabinet supplier nor the architect have any control over the plumber in this example, so only the general contractor can coordinate this process of getting the actual measurements of the future wall that the cabinets need to fit on. Then, the cabinet supplier needs to take their own measurements with their own tape measure since even tape measures can vary slightly.
This gets tricky when there’s a lot of existing conditions to plan around and not just one plumbing issue like the example above. The architect’s job is to convey a design INTENT. For example, the architect makes a drawing that shows a countertop that perfectly aligns with a door trim. Also the length of that countertop relates to the length of a future wall that still needs to be built. So, the architect’s drawing conveys putting a countertop between THIS and THAT, but the architect does not, and cannot, possibly know the actual dimensions for something that must eventually be built around several existing conditions and future conditions. Once the architect conveys the design intent, it is up to the general contractor to coordinate the layout of the walls, cabinets, appliances, door trims, counters, etc with all the team members involved with doing that work. General contractors often want everyone else to figure it out, but the coordination of those team members is the job of the contractor. That’s what they are being paid to do. Only a general contractor can direct their subcontractors. A client or architect is not allowed to direct the efforts of a general contractor’s subcontractors.
Once the general contractor coordinates the layout of all the relevant items with all those team members, then the cabinet supplier can take final measurements and update their original shop drawings. Then the architect can check the shop drawings again to ensure they meet the design intent. The architect is not verifying the precise dimensions to confirm whether things will fit in the existing conditions. The architect is only responsible for verifying dimensions that relate to intent. For example, if there’s an intent for a cabinet to be handicapped accessible, then the architect can verify the cabinet size meets those dimensional standards. Or if the intent is to ensure the client’s blender will fit inside a particular cabinet, then the architect can cross check the size of the client’s blender with the size of the cabinet on the shop drawing by looking up the size of the blender in the product manual. The architect can coordinate that information because the architect’s job is to comply with codes and ensure the client’s requests are served. The architect cannot coordinate the efforts of confirming dimensions of asbuilt or future construction conditions since the architect has no contractual obligation or authority over the people who will facilitate the work to build those conditions. In other words, since the builder must build a wall, the builder must perform the required measurements based on that wall they have built. The architect is not on the jobsite everyday to be able to measure the work of others, and furthermore, the builder can measure their own wall and control the EXACT size of the cabinets they want that will perfectly fit on it. It would be fallacious for a person sitting somewhere at a desk to provide a measurement for a cabinet when there’s actually a person right there on the jobsite that could do it better.
Consequently, the whole team must work together. A good general contractor will coordinate with all their subcontractors to layout everyone’s requirements, and then they will communicate that back to the team. A good architect will communicate the client’s approved design intent to the team, so the team knows what problems they are trying to solve (within the parameters laid out by the general contractor).
An architect can also provide rough dimensions to the cabinet supplier, so they can get the process started for creating shop drawings. Once the cabinet supplier can confirm the actual dimensions based on the general contractor’s coordination, those shop drawings can be updated for the architect to review to ensure the design intent is met. Then the general contractor can verify the dimensions on the shop drawings will work with the existing asbuilt conditions on the jobsite, and the contractor is there, in person, on the jobsite to be able to take those measurements and verify they will work within the construction tolerance that the general contractor is capable of working within and in control of. The general contractor can also verify the cabinets will fit through the front door when they are delivered!
A good team works together to make this process go smoothly. We have worked with some really bad and also some really great cabinet suppliers who really understand this process and make it go really smoothly. The good ones can even articulate to the general contractor some of the issues that are likely to occur with making everything fit. It is really rewarding and a lot of fun to work with great cabinet suppliers who have mastered their craft.
On one particular occasion, we had the pleasure of working with a cabinet supplier who assisted us in custom designing upper cabinets that would have prebuilt features for attaching the crown moldings and even for concealing wiring for undercabinet lighting. Even though he was not selling crown moldings or lighting, he was very effective in augmenting his product to work around those other conditions and make the builder’s job much easier. This resulted in an exemplary outcome for the whole team.
If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help
