Cabinet Maker Davie, FL

We do not quote cabinet work by the hour, and the hourly figures you find online are the reason the number in your head rarely survives the first estimate. An hourly rate prices a person's time; a kitchen is priced by what gets installed: how many doors and drawer fronts, whether the boxes stay or go, the grade of the material, and how many hours of fabrication the run needs before anyone arrives at your house. Two Davie kitchens with the same crew on the same clock can differ by twenty thousand dollars, so the rate tells you almost nothing. What we publish instead is the floor of a finished job: cabinet refacing on a typical Davie kitchen starts at $7,500 and usually lands between $7,500 and $12,000 complete, with every door, every drawer front, new hardware throughout and box edges veneered to match. If a company gives you an hourly rate and no scope, what you have is an open meter, and the meter does not run in your direction.

A 12x12 is the industry's yardstick rather than a real room: about twenty to twenty-five linear feet of cabinet run, which in Davie is usually a closed galley or an L-shape with a soffit over the uppers. The decision that sets the number is not the size, it is whether the boxes stay. Keeping them and refacing starts at $7,500 and typically runs to $12,000 installed at that size, with new doors, new drawer fronts, new hardware and exposed box edges veneered to match. Tearing the boxes out and rebuilding the run is a different project: on a small Davie kitchen the complete remodel that includes it starts at $15,000 and runs to about $24,000 with the countertop and backsplash in the number. The published aggregate for a Davie kitchen remodel, $12,800 to $21,200, straddles both because it mixes them together. Ask any quote you receive which of the two it is pricing before you compare it to anything.

Cheaper up front sometimes, cheaper installed almost never, and in this climate the gap widens with every year the kitchen stays in the house. Ready-to-assemble boxes look inexpensive because the shelf price excludes measuring, delivery, assembly, scribing to walls that are not square, hanging, and the filler work at every wall and appliance, and a 1987 Davie kitchen offers none of the straight conditions that make an off-the-shelf run drop in cleanly. The second cost is material. Most inexpensive boxes are particleboard or MDF with unsealed cut edges, and an unsealed edge is exactly what fails in a house that runs humid nine or ten months a year. So the real question is not built versus bought. It is what the box is made of, whether the cut edges are sealed, and who is responsible when something moves. We build and install under one license, which means whoever measured your kitchen is whoever warranties it for two years.

We cannot quote another company's price, but we can tell you what to check, because this is the most common surprise we hear on the phone. A retail cabinet number is usually the boxes, and sometimes boxes and doors, with measuring, delivery, tear-out of the old kitchen, assembly, installation, filler and trim work, and the countertop quoted separately, often by a third-party installer the retailer subcontracts to. The cabinets sold as custom that way are generally semi- custom: a manufacturer's catalog of sizes and finishes, not a run built to your walls. None of that is a trick, it is how the retail model works. What it means for you is that the shelf number is not comparable to an installed number from a contractor, and the person who measures your Davie kitchen may not be the one who installs it or the one holding the license on it. Ask any quote whether tear-out, installation and disposal are inside the figure. Ours are.

Color dates faster than anything else in a kitchen and matters less than almost everything else, which is the part the question usually misses. What is cooling off in South Florida is the cold bright white with gray undertones that ran through the late 2010s, and the heavy dark espresso that preceded it; what is going in instead is warm white, greige, soft green and natural wood tone, usually on a flatter door. Read that as a description of a cycle, not as advice. The thing that actually dates a Davie kitchen is not the color at all. It is an ornate raised-panel door profile, because a shape reads as a decade in a way a repaintable surface never does. If this worries you, spend the attention on the profile and pick the color the way you would if nobody were watching: a painted door can be recoated in a weekend ten years from now, and a profile can only be replaced.

This is the single most useful distinction in cabinet work, and most people arrive not knowing it. Refacing replaces the doors, the drawer fronts and the hardware, and covers the exposed edges of the existing boxes with a matching veneer. You keep the boxes and the layout; everything you touch and everything you see is new. Refinishing keeps the doors you already have and changes their finish by stripping, sanding and recoating or spraying them. Refacing changes the look of the kitchen completely and costs more. Refinishing is cheaper and faster, but it is bounded by what is already there: a dated door profile stays a dated door profile in a different color, and a door that has started to swell in Davie's humidity will not hold a new finish. If the doors are solid wood, square and in a shape you still like, refinishing is a real option. If any of those three is false, refacing is the honest answer.

Sustained moisture, and it is not a marketing line. Roughly 61 inches of annual rainfall and a long humid season keep indoor moisture high year-round in Davie, and the materials most cabinet boxes are made from, MDF and melamine-faced particleboard, absorb it through unsealed cut edges. That is why the failure pattern is so consistent: the base of the box swells first, because that is where the unsealed bottom edge sits closest to a floor that gets mopped, and because the two wettest appliances in the house are the sink and the dishwasher. Add thirty-five years, which is what the median 1987 Davie house has on it, and the base of a particleboard cabinet has been through that cycle a few thousand times. It is the reason solid wood and moisture-rated plywood boxes get specified here even though they cost more upfront, and the reason the sink cabinet is the first door we open at a walkthrough.