Custom builder Jaime Perkins shares his tips for a smooth, damage-free cabinetry installation through careful attention to detail.
“We have been installing the cabinetry on our own projects for decades now and can usually get an entire kitchen installed in one day,” Perkins says. “One of the main topics we cover is how to attach the face frames of the cabinets together in a perfectly tight joint without damaging the face frames.”
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Perkins also stresses how important it is to review floor plans and mark cabinets before installation to make sure each unit is positioned correctly.
Watch the video to learn more.
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Transcript
All right, we're taking the doors off all the cabinets. Where they go in there lighter and also the door can get dinged. Cabinets, they are so fun. Okay so when working with these finished cabinets, it's really hard not to scratch them at all. Okay, so in an effort to not scratch anything up with my tool belt, look at all this junk, right? It's pretty smart to put the upper cabinets in first.
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Now what you need to do though, is you need to get your layout for the cabinets on the base, and you need to make sure you know exactly where everything is going, and then move that
stuff aside and go ahead and attach your upper cabinets. You can stand right underneath. You can get a ladder really close okay, and you're not leaning and reaching out so far making it harder than it already is. We've also established the bottom of this cabinet with a pencil line drawn with a level, and then we screwed this strip to the wall a ledger. You might call it to set the cabinet's on to make it really easy for us to hang the cabinets.
Floating floors? No problem
Now there's screw holes in the wall, but all that's gonna get covered with the backsplash, so we're lucky in this case. We can do that all right. You can't always do that or you'll have holes in the drywall all right next to where the top height of the cabinet is established. By the height of the fridge panel, we have a solid plywood fridge panel. It's eight feet even so we must have the top of these cabinets at 8 feet even, so check out the floor. It's plywood cabinets are sitting right on the plywood, okay. Now the reason we're doing that today is because we have a floating floor, and you can't put fixed objects like cabinets on them okay cuz it'll buckle the floor when the floor wants to move. It wants to move just a little bit. Okay so we're gonna run the flooring up to about a quarter inch away from the toe kick, put the toe cake on and then a tiny little trim will cover the gap and allow the floor to expand and contract.
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All right let's talk about the nitty-gritty of attaching the cabinets to each other. The first time I installed kitchen cabinets, I didn't know that you were supposed to screw the face frames together, and so I screwed the plywood boxes together and it was really hard.
See the full transcript here.