How a custom cabinet is actually made

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Every custom cabinet starts as a survey drawing rather than a door sample. The room is measured at several heights, because walls lean; the floor is checked across the whole run, because floors fall; and the position of every pipe, vent, cable and window reveal is recorded, because one of them always sits exactly where the carcase wants to be.

From the survey comes a cutting plan. Sheet goods are broken down oversize, then trimmed square, so that any movement released by the first cut is taken out before the final dimension. Carcase parts are machined in matched sets rather than one at a time, which is the simplest way to keep a run of cabinets identical when they meet each other on a wall.

Assembly is where squareness is set for the life of the piece. A carcase clamped and checked on the diagonal, with a back that is itself square and glued into a rebate, becomes a rigid box that does not depend on the wall to hold its shape. Face frames, where the design calls for them, are jointed and applied flat, and the openings are sized from the frame rather than the box, because the door has to suit what the eye sees.

Doors and drawer fronts are made last and, where the material allows, from stock cut in sequence so that the grain runs across a run of doors instead of jumping between them. Drawer boxes are jointed at the corners; hardware is fitted with the box in the carcase, not on the bench, so that the reveal around each front is set against its neighbours.

Finishing happens before installation wherever it can. A sprayed and cured finish in controlled conditions is more even than anything achievable in a occupied house, and it keeps the dust and the fumes out of the room the cabinets are going into. Parts that must be fitted on site, such as scribes and fillers, are finished with the rest and cut to length at the wall.

Installation is the shortest stage and the one where the earlier care shows. Cabinets are levelled off a laser line rather than off the floor, packed to the line, joined to each other before they are fixed to the wall, and scribed to the plaster last. A run installed this way sits with consistent reveals from one end to the other, which is the only visible evidence that any of the preceding steps were done properly.

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