Brian shares tips for installing a base cabinet in your kitchen, laundry room, bathroom, or home office. Comment, give us a call, or reach out to your Cabinet Coach with any questions. We hope you enjoy your new cabinets!

Discussion

4 thoughts on “Base Cabinet Installation Tips

  1. Do you suggest putting in the flooring before or after the cabinets go in?
    In my case, I am down to the diagonal floorboards and can do it either way.

    thanks

    1. Hey Gregg,

      Its really a matter of preference, but mine is to floor right up to the walls and then set the cabinets on top. If you choose to install cabinets first, you must know how high your flooring will be and elevate the cabinets by that amount. If you do not, when you floor in to your dishwasher, stove and fridge openings, you may cause an issue with them not fitting because you have now closed the gap too much. For this reason alone, I like to install the floor to the walls. The only real reason I can give for installing cabinets first and then flooring up to them is if money is a huge concern as you would be wasting flooring under the cabinets that will never be seen. Another thing to consider…If you EVER think you may need to change the cabinet layout, run the flooring to the walls. Otherwise, you will expose un-floored areas of the space when you go to remove/relocate cabinets. Let us know if we can help you further!

  2. What is the best way to attach kitchen island cabinets back-to-back? Is it essentially two individual installations where the end seams are covered by panels or is there a way screw them together so the island ends are secured to one another?

    1. Hey Chris, Thanks for your question. Each island design is different, so I recommend that you ask your Cabinet Coach for an explanation of the installation order, based on your specific layout. Thanks!

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Video Transcript

We're going to talk about basic base moldings, casing moldings for around doors and windows, then just some ancillary trims that you might use in your job. I'll start with the base moldings. Conestoga has, again, a number of base moldings that I'll go through in a moment. Bear in mind all a base molding is, is a chunk of wood X high by 96 inches long with a profile at the top. Logically, you can take any piece of any size material. Say you wanted a 8 inch tall base. Order an 8 foot long by 8 inch tall piece of solid wood 3/4 thick, and put a door hinge profile on it. Any door hinge profile. PRS2 is nice. Get more ornate with an H2 or an E2. Whatever you want to do to the top edge. It's just a door profile. Conestoga does have some standard kind of run of the mill bases we've all grown up with. That’s what I'm going to go through now.
Starting with our standard moldings, we have two. One is the number 10 colonial casing, or colonial base molding. Colonial because it has a cap. That kind of cap decorations been around for five hundred years. You see it a lot in Home Depot or Lowe's where they'll sell you just the square material, and the cap molding would sit on top. In this case, it's integrated into the base molding. It's 4 1/2 inches high. The face of it's about 3 3/4, so you go about a 3/4 inch cap at the top. Again, that's our number ten.
Another common one, especially with beaded inset cabinets is the 381 beaded base. Beaded because it's got this delicate bead at the top. It's going to grab some glaze for you. It looks terrific as a base molding. You can also use it upside down, as again, we talked about in the other video, soffit molding to slide your crown up and down with the bead hanging downward.
Now we got a couple other versions of casing, or base moldings rather, that have these decorative caps. They're just different sizes. This one has a shorter size. Shorter flat size, but a taller cap. Okay. That one I think is 3 1/2 inches tall, I believe. That one is the 2021 base molding. This one has a little less of an ornate cap to it. Then again it's 3 1/2 inches tall. That's the 897 base. Now, this is the same as that 897, but it's taller yet. This one's 5 1/2 inches wide, and it's the 898 base. These are going to be able to cover larger expanses. A lot of times you're trying to meet up with some of the old farmhouse trims that were taller, and that will allow you to do that.
Let's move on to our casing moldings. Casings, traditionally, you walk into Home Depot or Lowe's, they're going to talk about clam shell and colonial. That's our version of a colonial casing. It's just a little more ornate where it's got this neat little bead on it. It's a little more pizzazzy than the casing that you see at Home Depot or Lowe's. We like that a lot.
Traditional clam shell from the 70's days. Still needs to be used in some cases. That clam shell's pretty standard. I need to give you the number: that's the number 9. The colonial casing's number 21. A little more delicate version of a colonial casing. This is the 737 casing. Again, these are used for windows and doors primarily. I can't think of too many applications where you'll apply them to your cabinetry. This is just like the number 21, just larger. I think 3 or 3 1/2 inches wide. This is the 466 casing.

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