Cabinet Joint offers a wide variety of mullion configurations and options! As you’ll learn in the video, each mullion door is hand-crafted with care and years of expertise. Options include Arched Lite Mullions, Diamond Lite Mullions, Elliptical Mullions, X Variant Mullions, Vesica Mullions, and many more. For a price, you can even create your own mullions through Special Designs. In this video Brian will guide you through styles, construction, sizing options, limitations, and more! Feel free to reach out to your Cabinet Coach with any other questions!
Video Transcript
Hey everybody, Brian from The Cabinet Joint here. The topic of the moment is custom mullions at Conestoga Woods Specialties. What I have here are some arch mullions, but I want to talk in general about their mullion door options and some things to be aware of.
Typically, when people have thought of mullions in the past, it’s just your typical grids where you can get a three by four or whatever. They’re all symmetrical grids running this way. However, what has really become popular in the last few years are mullions like this—Diamond light, X lights, or elliptical mullions. Conestoga offers a dozen or more options on their website, but I want to discuss some of the limitations, pricing, and things to be aware of.
Patterns like this—this is an arch mullion—you can see the same exact job, and I’ve got a wide door and a narrow door. Look what happens to the mullion as the door gets narrower. The arches get compressed to the top of the door, so these areas get much smaller. The mullions don’t drop down as far. Unfortunately, that’s not something we can control. We can’t dictate to Conestoga to make this drop all the way down to here. It wouldn’t look right; it’s just not part of the program. So, be aware that as door widths change, your pattern is going to change, and that’s just something we have to live with. X lights or Diamond lights—as you compress the size of the door—the diamond gets smaller because the diamond has to be symmetrical. So, there are things to know and be aware of. If you need a CAD drawing of a specific door size to see how it’s going to look, we can supply you with a CAD drawing showing how your door will look with the size you’ve chosen. Check out our website to get an idea of all the different mullion options available to you. Then, carefully think through your design, especially regarding which doors in the kitchen will get the mullions and how they will look.
Now, let’s talk a little bit about the construction. All of Conestoga’s mullion doors do not use the corrugated spline or metal spline that you see on so many stock box cabinets at Lowe’s or Home Depot. Instead, they clamp the individual spline pieces together with a corrugated fastener pressed into the wood, and that’s what holds it together.
Conestoga actually routes out a groove, and they put a wood spline in there. It’s actually a piece of wood embedded, cut off smoothly, glued, and fastened. Let’s get a close-up to show you. But that is the sign of true craftsmanship.
Most other cabinet companies—unless you’re dealing with someone like Conestoga, purchased through us—will dictate that only certain cabinets in your kitchen—a wall 30/30 or a wall 42/36 or whatever—can have these lights. What they do is they are making the same door over and over and over again. Conestoga is making every mullion door custom to fit the cabinet box you’ve ordered. So, if you want to do a 31.5-inch wide door or cabinet over here with double doors, and over here, you’ll want a 41.5-inch wide or a 36-inch. They’re going to make all these custom arch pieces individually for that door. To give you an idea of what that looks like, we’ve taken tours at the Conestoga Factory, and one door—one person sits there at a bench—one door takes them almost half a day. You’re custom shaping every one of these to get them to cope. There’s a lot of handwork. This is not being done by a robot. Hence, the price is very steep. Some of these custom mullions can go for 500 bucks on a door very easily. So, when you get a kitchen full of them, you can be thousands of dollars in custom mullions. Understand the effect it’s going to have on your job from a price standpoint. Don’t go crazy with these, or it’s going to cost you. You’re going to want to have your sales rep quote these as well because every custom mullion has a different price tag based on its complexity. X lights won’t be as much as these elliptical ones. If you’ve got a double elliptical where you have the same pattern at the top and bottom, that’s going to get crazy expensive. Have your sales rep quote it for you so you’ll understand the price impact on your job.
Aside from that, the only thing I can suggest is when you’re doing these mullions—as well as any of our normal mullions like the Prairie 11 or 9 light offsets—think about the inside of the cabinet. If you’re getting odd species or something unique, we can’t do the matching interior with that. So, you’ll want to put frosted or opaque glass in there so you can’t quite see the interior of the cabinet. If you’re using clear glass, keep in mind that we can’t do quarter-sawn white oak on the inside of the cabinet. This customer will have to think about how they want the inside of their cabinet finished. They’ll be doing the staining on this; it’s an unfinished door. You’ll have to make some of those calculations yourself, and your sales rep or designer can help you. So, again, check out our website to see pictures of all the custom, crazy mullions you can do. It’s really a nice way to set your kitchen off. Just be careful not to go too hog wild with it; it can get expensive. If you have any questions, call your cabinet coach at 888-211-6482. And as always, thanks for watching. Have a good day!”
