Kitchen Cabinets WP Simple Storage Service
What You Need to Know about Kitchen Cabinets If you enter “kitchen cabinets” into the Google search engine, you’ll get over 9-‐ million results. The front end is loaded with commercial discount cabinet manufacturers. The sidebar ads are all for low cost, buy direct, wholesale. High quality. Delivered in 3-‐5 days. All wood. Materials and labor included. There are no listings for high end, custom cabinet shops. A cabinet is a pretty simple thing. A box, really. It may have some shelves. The shelves may be adjustable. Or maybe bins instead of shelves, bins that pull out on tracks. There’s a door, of course. And it’s the door that makes the cabinet, because that’s what you see. The door, how it fits over the box, or inside the box, how it’s hinged – visibly or invisibly – what the pulls look like, if indeed pulls are needed at all. The cabinet could be in your bathroom, or your den, or your kitchen. But it is in the kitchen that the cabinet, as we have come to know it, has truly taken hold. It wasn’t really a relevant part of the kitchen until the early 20th century. Before that time, kitchens were different than they are today – utilitarian, spare, often hidden. There might have been cupboards, as in a larder. And as likely as not they were built by carpenters at the time the interior of the house was finished. The carpenters would have used dimensioned lumber. The Greene and Greene designed Gamble House in Pasadena, CA, built in 1908 for an extremely wealthy client , is as beautiful a kitchen as you’re likely to find for the time. Storage is built in, for the most part. The few freestanding work surfaces with drawers beneath are like works of art. You won’t find a lick of plywood. Paneling that today would be veneer over MDF is solid wood paneling. The real thing. From the kinds of trees that no longer exist.
A run of cabinets beneath a counter plumbed with a sink – that’s truly modern, post-‐ World War I. And cabinets hanging from the wall above the counter, even more modern still. Add a gas oven and range, removing the wood or coal-‐fired predecessor. Add electricity to the mix. Add refrigeration. Add modern ideas about nutrition and family and organization. As the kitchen changes, so too does the cabinet. And a lot of the change has to do with available materials, new tools, new methods of manufacture, new hardware for hanging doors and drawers. Plywood displaces solid wood. There’s an inherent problem that comes of building with solid wood. It moves across the grain as the moisture content of the air changes through the year, swelling and contracting, swelling and contracting. It has been a problem ever since Egyptians started building chairs. Skilled craftsmen know how to build for wood movement, so joints don’t work loose, and panels don’t warp. But skilled craftsmen come at a cost. There’s nothing mass market about them. And it’s the demands of the mass market that begins to drive the changes in the kitchen, in cabinetry, moving it ever closer to what we find familiar today. The table saw, router, and drill press displace hand tools and hand tool skills. The table saw dimensions the plywood accurately, and repeatably. The router cuts accurate rabbets on the edges of the plywood pieces, and dadoes (grooves) across the grain. The rabbets and dadoes lock in the alignment of the plywood pieces for a screwed-‐and-‐glued cabinet. With a drill press, or some other version of precision boring, you can place holes exactly where you want them, at exactly the depth you have in mind. Dowels go in the holes to accept face frames cut from dimensioned hardwood lumber. The door hangs on the frame. In time, the rabbets and dadoes will be displaced by a broader doweling technology that allows pieces of plywood to butt up against each other, accurately. And this in turn will be displaced by the assemblage technology everyone knows from an Ikea experience. In this latest evolution the sawing, routing, and boring technologies have all been combined into one, computer-‐driven machine that does everything with repeatable precision. One shop monkey feeds sheets of pressboard into the CNC machine, another removes the cut and labeled parts, and another assembles the cabinet with a minimum of fuss and tools – or better yet, you assemble everything right out of the box. When plywood enters the picture the making of a kitchen becomes the business of a small specialty shop, not the provenance of carpenters or skilled master cabinetmakers. There is a time in America when any part of a city, any cluster of neighborhoods, has a cabinet shop where a reasonably skilled craftsman, a woodworker, a cabinetmaker, can take the measure of your kitchen and produce a run of cabinets and counters that revitalize the space. As American neighborhoods become more mobile, with housing changing hands, the kitchen is often the first
room in a house to be remodeled by the new owners. The housing in a cluster of neighborhoods is so similar the cabinetmaker needs no plans. Instead, he keeps a collection of story sticks hanging on his wall – pieces of wood with all the dimensions of the relevant cabinets marked out. He doesn’t need to measure anything; it’s all there on the story stick. Repeatable. In the US, those neighborhood shops lasted through World War II. Europe had to rebuild from the ground up, and that’s when cabinets really started to change. Post-‐ war Europe turned to manufactured forest products – essentially sawdust mixed with glue and pressed to shape. It is a product that remains flat, that doesn’t warp, that can be cut and milled to shape. In and of itself, it’s ugly. But with the application of fine veneer and edge banding, it becomes all but impossible to tell what’s made from solid wood anymore. In fact, most pieces of furniture – cabinets most certainly – aren’t. Through the end of the 20th century, European engineers design new machinery to conquer issues of joinery, because screws and nails tend to pull free, and edges don’t bond well with glue. There’s a generation of doweling machinery that bores precision holes in pre-‐cut pieces, inserts the glued dowels, and presses the pieces into place, perfectly square. Cabinetry. It’s a machinery design fluke that the standard European boring machine creates holes 32 millimeters apart – but 32mm becomes the gold standard. Hardware is based on it. New styles of screws that hold in pressboard. New ways of hinging doors. New slides for drawers. All built to the 32mm standard. Manufacturing machinery is based on it. For a time, American and European standards go their own ways. But the American companies that switch to European standards and styles of manufacture thrive -‐-‐-‐ they are the ones at the very front of the 9-‐million Google entries for “kitchen cabinet” -‐-‐ and the old style American cabinet manufacturing processes decline. The biggest buyers today of the best computer-‐driven CNC machinery Europe manufactures are found in China. So what does any of this mean to the modern homeowner in the throes of rehabbing or remodeling a kitchen, a den, a bathroom? It means the choices you confront are all but limitless.
A run of cabinets beneath a counter plumbed with a sink – that’s truly modern, post-‐ World War I. And cabinets hanging from the wall above the counter, even more modern still. Add a gas oven and range, removing the wood or coal-‐fired predecessor. Add electricity to the mix. Add refrigeration. Add modern ideas about nutrition and family and organization. As the kitchen changes, so too does the cabinet. And a lot of the change has to do with available materials, new tools, new methods of manufacture, new hardware for hanging doors and drawers. Plywood displaces solid wood. There’s an inherent problem that comes of building with solid wood. It moves across the grain as the moisture content of the air changes through the year, swelling and contracting, swelling and contracting. It has been a problem ever since Egyptians started building chairs. Skilled craftsmen know how to build for wood movement, so joints don’t work loose, and panels don’t warp. But skilled craftsmen come at a cost. There’s nothing mass market about them. And it’s the demands of the mass market that begins to drive the changes in the kitchen, in cabinetry, moving it ever closer to what we find familiar today. The table saw, router, and drill press displace hand tools and hand tool skills. The table saw dimensions the plywood accurately, and repeatably. The router cuts accurate rabbets on the edges of the plywood pieces, and dadoes (grooves) across the grain. The rabbets and dadoes lock in the alignment of the plywood pieces for a screwed-‐and-‐glued cabinet. With a drill press, or some other version of precision boring, you can place holes exactly where you want them, at exactly the depth you have in mind. Dowels go in the holes to accept face frames cut from dimensioned hardwood lumber. The door hangs on the frame. In time, the rabbets and dadoes will be displaced by a broader doweling technology that allows pieces of plywood to butt up against each other, accurately. And this in turn will be displaced by the assemblage technology everyone knows from an Ikea experience. In this latest evolution the sawing, routing, and boring technologies have all been combined into one, computer-‐driven machine that does everything with repeatable precision. One shop monkey feeds sheets of pressboard into the CNC machine, another removes the cut and labeled parts, and another assembles the cabinet with a minimum of fuss and tools – or better yet, you assemble everything right out of the box. When plywood enters the picture the making of a kitchen becomes the business of a small specialty shop, not the provenance of carpenters or skilled master cabinetmakers. There is a time in America when any part of a city, any cluster of neighborhoods, has a cabinet shop where a reasonably skilled craftsman, a woodworker, a cabinetmaker, can take the measure of your kitchen and produce a run of cabinets and counters that revitalize the space. As American neighborhoods become more mobile, with housing changing hands, the kitchen is often the first
room in a house to be remodeled by the new owners. The housing in a cluster of neighborhoods is so similar the cabinetmaker needs no plans. Instead, he keeps a collection of story sticks hanging on his wall – pieces of wood with all the dimensions of the relevant cabinets marked out. He doesn’t need to measure anything; it’s all there on the story stick. Repeatable. In the US, those neighborhood shops lasted through World War II. Europe had to rebuild from the ground up, and that’s when cabinets really started to change. Post-‐ war Europe turned to manufactured forest products – essentially sawdust mixed with glue and pressed to shape. It is a product that remains flat, that doesn’t warp, that can be cut and milled to shape. In and of itself, it’s ugly. But with the application of fine veneer and edge banding, it becomes all but impossible to tell what’s made from solid wood anymore. In fact, most pieces of furniture – cabinets most certainly – aren’t. Through the end of the 20th century, European engineers design new machinery to conquer issues of joinery, because screws and nails tend to pull free, and edges don’t bond well with glue. There’s a generation of doweling machinery that bores precision holes in pre-‐cut pieces, inserts the glued dowels, and presses the pieces into place, perfectly square. Cabinetry. It’s a machinery design fluke that the standard European boring machine creates holes 32 millimeters apart – but 32mm becomes the gold standard. Hardware is based on it. New styles of screws that hold in pressboard. New ways of hinging doors. New slides for drawers. All built to the 32mm standard. Manufacturing machinery is based on it. For a time, American and European standards go their own ways. But the American companies that switch to European standards and styles of manufacture thrive -‐-‐-‐ they are the ones at the very front of the 9-‐million Google entries for “kitchen cabinet” -‐-‐ and the old style American cabinet manufacturing processes decline. The biggest buyers today of the best computer-‐driven CNC machinery Europe manufactures are found in China. So what does any of this mean to the modern homeowner in the throes of rehabbing or remodeling a kitchen, a den, a bathroom? It means the choices you confront are all but limitless.
