What Makes A Kitchen Cabinet High Quality?

Contractors for kitchen cabinets are essential to the success of any kitchen renovation. This is especially true if you’re making a major change, such as getting new kitchen cabinets. Kitchen cabinets are not only the most visible part of any kitchen renovation; they are also the most expensive. For people who don’t have any experience planning a home kitchen improvement, you can expect the kitchen remodeling companies to figure in tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and install the kitchen cabinets alone.

With so much riding on the kitchen cabinets, you want to make sure that the most prominent investment also sees significant improvement. If you’re willing to spend that much money on a new set of kitchen cabinets, you don’t want it to feel the same as your old ones. So what are some of the elements that make up high-quality kitchen cabinets?

Soft Close Hinges

While it’s not a necessity, this is a feature that is always a sign of quality. Typical hinges swing freely, meaning that cabinet doors can be slammed shut or swing shut by themselves as with a door, resulting in a slam. “Soft close hinges,” however, eliminate this problem.

Soft close hinges do a couple of things for homeowners; they have mechanisms built in so that if you start to shut the cabinet, the hinge “takes over” and completes the action for you. More importantly, however, is these hinges control the speed of shutting so that they always close quietly.

Soft Close/Gliding Drawers

In the same way that cabinets can get noisy with shutting, the same is true for drawers. However, soft close drawers are also available, preventing loud, accidental slams as things are removed from or put back into drawers.

Another sign of high quality, however, is the smoothness of opening and closing drawers. With cheaper installations, the friction of a drawer as it slides along a track can interfere with opening and closing. With a higher quality installation, drawers “glide” smoothly, making them easy to open and close.

Toe Kicksz

The kitchen cabinets under the counter typically do not go all the way to the floor. A thoughtful addition to any kitchen is to take this into account by installing “toe kicks” at the bottom of the cabinets. This is an “indentation” that allows people to stand at the counter with a few extra inches for their toes. In other words, the bottom kitchen cabinet does not go all the way down to the floor, flush with the cabinet doors themselves, but gives some extra wiggle room. Quality toe kicks are fully enclosed and leave no space under the cabinet for things to roll under or get lost.

Full Height Back Panel

Finally, a high-quality kitchen cabinet will have a full-height back panel. This means that the cabinet has a backing that reaches from top to bottom. This allows the cabinet to be installed at any height the homeowner needs. If a cabinet lacks this feature, the contractors for kitchen cabinets must anchor the cabinets to the wall based on the limitations of the back panel.