Cabinets With A Capital "T"

There have been many changes in the manufactured cabinet industry over the thirty years or so I have been involved.

I first discovered manufactured cabinets back in the 1970's when I was building, finishing and installing my own cabinets; first in my own home, and later in the homes of clients.

I was always impressed by the look of the finishes because I had such difficulty achieving beautiful and durable finishes myself.

Back in those days there were few choices in cabinet finishes for a small shop like mine. There was lacquer; which was easy to apply, but fragile and brittle in use. Then there were urethane and varathane finishes, which seemed to create a durable result; but ultimately would soften and go gummy with exposure to the oils in your hands and the kitchen environment. I never experimented with oil finishes because they were more often used for furniture and not thought to hold up well to the harsh kitchen setting.

I only learned about catalyzed varnish finishes when I took steps to move out of the cabinetmaker role to become a kitchen designer marketing factory built cabinets.

My first employer was a Wood-Mode dealer who sent me to Wood-Mode's week-long training program at the factory in Kreamer, PA. I was blown away by the huge factory and showroom and the beautiful cabinets they turned out there. I was especially impressed by the demonstrations of the durability of Wood-Mode's catalyzed varnish finishes.

Since then I have seen that durability in reality year after year with most every sizable cabinet manufacturer in the country.

The finish is what separates permeable wood from the harsh kitchen environment. These cabinets really hold up! For that reason I have remained committed to manufactured cabinets over local custom, especially here in California where it was illegal to apply catalyzed varnish because of the toxicity of the process for workers.

Some years ago the toxicity issue became problematic even in the Mid-West and East, where most quality cabinet manufacturers are located; and the manufacturers pushed their finish suppliers to create non-toxic catalyzed varnishes. Now California shops are adopting non-toxic catalyzed varnishes and the reasons to prefer manufactured cabinets are becoming blurred.

There have always been distinct advantages to working with a local cabinet shop: They build the cabinets to fit from their own measurements, so there is not the concern that a mistake could ruin a designer. There are also occasionally conditions hidden behind the walls or cabinets that even an experienced designer cannot anticipate. Having cabinets locally built can save everyone's necks...designer, contractor and homeowner...in a situation like that.

Homeowners also have a different perception about local vs. manufactured cabinets: Consumers see manufactured cabinets as a finished product with consistency that rivals plastic (an incorrect perception). Local custom is seen as more a sum of its parts. There is a sense that individual pieces of wood are assembled to make the cabinets and that stains and finishes can be easily modified to achieve a desired result.

Uniformity in wood cabinet doors and panels is NEVER an accident, but instead a system of examination of the wood at every step in the process to make sure that like pieces of wood end up in the same doors and ultimately in the same kitchens. Such examination is an expensive way to produce cabinets, especially since cabinet quality wood is becoming more and more dear and harder to come by all the time.

When I first started in this business, cabinet doors with solid raised panels from upper-end manufacturers had one, two or three pieces of wood, edge-glued together to make up the solid wood panel (depending on the width of the door). Today the same manufacturers are gluing up panels for a single door made from five to ten strips of wood.

The reason for the change is that old-growth timber is not available from which to cut the larger pieces of wood the way it used to be. In other words...Our demand for wood products means the forests can't keep growing at the pace we are cutting them down. Therefore, we are cutting younger trees to meet our demand for cabinet quality woods..

Not only are there more pieces of wood in a cabinet door, but they are also more variable in their color, pattern and grain.

This variability makes it harder for a cabinet manufacturer to build a door in which all of the pieces match.

Manufacturers are able to build better cabinets for less due to these factors:

1. They locate their factories close to plentiful supplies of their raw materials and in areas where labor is cheaper.

2. They develop economies of scale by building many of the same items over and over.

3. They depend on suppliers of their raw materials to provide consistent product to their written and negotiated specifications.

4. They computerize their processes to reduce the number of employees required.

5. They develop a comprehensive catalog to help designers work with their products.

6. They hire factory representatives who develop and train a system of dealers to market their products over wide geographical areas of the country.

7. They maintain a fleet of trucks and drivers to safely and efficiently deliver their products to their dealers and/or end users.

8. They warranty and stand behind their products, some better manufacturers for a lifetime.

As soon as you add the task of eyeball matching pieces of wood to such a factory setting, you increase the need for storage space to store pieces of wood that are unmatched to date. You increase the waste factor to deal with the pieces of wood that are bought from suppliers but don't ever match well enough to make it into a door. You also increase the time the order takes from submission until it leaves the factory. Just in Time Manufacturing goes out the window. These factors increase the price of the cabinets to the ultra-high-end, making them unaffordable to the broad middle where most sales of custom manufactured cabinets go.

This brings us to my problem: Custom manufactured cabinets don't LOOK as good as they used to look. Consumers have expectations based upon what they have seen or purchased themselves in the past. Those expectations are no longer being met. The process getting here has been slow, but inexorable.

I recently did a kitchen where most of the (medium stained cherry) doors that were delivered on the cabinets were unacceptable to the client. She had done several kitchens over her lifetime and had what she thought were reasonable expectations of uniformity. The manufacturer took a bath trying to make her happy, and ultimately she was, but there was certainly a lot of headache and heartache for the client, the cabinet dealer, the contractor, the manufacturer, and me.

That's trouble with a capital T.

Peggy