INSTALLATION

Installation of a quality set of cabinets begins before they are even built. The design is matched to the architecture and the tastes of the home or office owner. Even when a design is provided by an architect or designer there are a number of decisions to be made by the cabinetmaker with regard to how they are going to ultimately fit into the room. Often there are a lot of compromises made at this phase to make the installation easy. In high quality cabinets the variations in the room are noted and provided for, the cabinets are fit closely to walls and "scribed" (fit to) the inevitable variations. This is not as easy as it may seem. To keep up with the inevitable variations requires numerous visits to the job site and a constant monitoring as the cabinets are built. These margins are ideally kept to the minimum and they are balanced, that is to say they are close to the same on the right as they are on the left where they meet the wall.

It can take a lot of time to do this job properly. The cabinets need to go into the room level and true as any twisting distorts the box and causes poor alignment of doors and drawers. To carefully lay out a set of cabinets and install them without trim of any kind is quite a challenge, but this is what conveys the quality of fit and finish. Wide scribe strips, overlaid trim, unevenly matched and unimaginative repetition of modular cabinets create a "stuck on" look that isn't very complimentary to a home or office. Subtle though this phase of the job is it is very important. There is the same paradox, operative in any fine performance: the simpler it looks the harder it is to achieve. Cleanly designed, well thought out cabinets that are carefully installed simply look like they belong to the structure.