Establishing the highest elevation in the room is a critical step before installing your cabinets. Since cabinets can’t be trimmed down to match uneven floors, identifying the highest point ensures everything is installed at the correct height from the start. In this video, we show you how to properly survey the space and account for floor variations. From there, cabinets are shimmed as needed to create a perfectly level, consistent installation across the entire room.
Video Transcript
Justin:
It's a glorious day here at Cabinet Joint. I'm Justin, and today I'm here with Josh. And Josh, our cabinets are all built and assembled. We just made sure all the measurements fit and everything fits in the room. Now, you have a laser out and you have a level. So, I'm assuming we aren't good to just go and start putting cabinets on the wall. So, what have you done here?
Josh:
Yeah. So, this is probably the most important part about this process. Aside from making sure everything fits and is ordered correctly, you cannot take a cabinet and cut it down just because you found a high spot in the floor. You have to establish the highest elevation of the room first.
Step one, we've taken the time ahead of this video to kind of figure out where that was. And we found it to be in this corner back here. And what we do is we know that the cabinet height is 34 ½". That's the height of our base cabinets. So when we found that this was the highest point of the room, we had a line struck here at 34 ½". And if you see, we've got this handy dandy level here with a piece of tape on it. You can use a piece of wood. We call it a story pole in the trades. And this is telling a story of high and low. It's marked low. It's marked high above your 34 ½" line.
So, if you were to take this level and put it next to a cabinet, it should match the height of the cabinet. So, what we want to do is we want to go over here to our high point and we want to survey the room about every foot to 2 ft front and back of every cabinet and just get a lay of the land and understand what's happening here with the floor. You can't cut a cabinet down, but you can surely shim it up. And we found that this area over here is actually our worst spot. This is probably a heavy eighth, which is not bad. You can expect to see ¼" up to ½" sometimes of variance in the run of a cabinet. So, we're fortunate to have a pretty good floor here.
Justin:
Wow. So, thankfully our framers did a pretty good job of keeping everything pretty close to level. So what do you do now that this is, you know, ⅛" off?
Josh:
Yeah. So, really we're creating like a mental image of the floor here. What we're going to do is we're going to use shims. You can use wooden shims. I like flat plastic shims. And we're just going to go cabinet by cabinet through our install and try to bring everything up to this height. And this is our 34 1/2 inch line. We want to make sure our countertops are level, which then moves into our tile backsplash or our countertops here. We want everything to start strong and finish strong.
Justin:
What happens then? And say it's more than 1". Is there any tolerance that you really need to look out for?
Josh:
Well, if it's beyond ⅛" Some people are okay with a small gap. Others may not like the gap. So, we sell moldings, scribe moldings, base shoe moldings, things like that. Even a a base molding. You can basically conceal that gap at the end of a run or around the bottom of a cabinet. Not a big deal. That's really the the main solution there.
Justin:
It's going to be hidden is what you're saying.
Josh:
Yeah.
Justin:
Awesome. That's great news. Now, what happens if you don't have a fancy laser like this? Is there any other way to do this?
Josh:
Yeah. So, if you don't have a laser, we can still do it the same way. We can basically come over here. We can find our high point and off of our high point, use a long level, a 6 ft level, 8 ft level, and basically make sure that bubble is sitting straight and continue our line all the way down both walls.
Justin:
Well, this information is good to know, Josh. I didn't realize how crucial it is to make sure that you do find your high point and work off of that. If you do need any help finding your High Point, you can talk to your cabinet coach or you can call us at 888-211-6482.
Thanks for watching. Have a great day.
