What are the differences between custom kitchen cabinets and cabinets bought at the building supply stores? There are many! Simply put, custom cabinets make the most and best use of the space you have available and can give you exactly what you want and need. Let's take a look at the numbers.

The cabinets you purchase from a supply store are pre-built cabinets. They are manufactured in an assembly line at a large facility and are only available in pre-determined sizes. These sizes start at 9" wide and go to 48" wide (in 3" increments). Example: base cabinets 9" wide X 34 ½" high X 24" deep (and 12", 15", 18" and up to 48" wide)
They basically limit you to those sizes. The same is true of the upper cabinets, only these are also offered in three heights (30", 36" and 42" X 12" deep). Some of these companies will also offer 15" deep for the upper cabinets.
Each cabinet is built by itself as a separate cabinet.

Example: If you have 11'-2" (134") of cabinets, you could do the following with pre-built (or box) cabinets:

1 - 48" W X 24" deep base cabinet
1 - 24" W
1 - 36" W
1 - 24" W or 132" total

Following this example, you would have 2" left over. The only option these companies can offer you is to apply a filler strip to cover the leftover space. This is not only irregular in appearance, but a loss of space. Also, because each cabinet is built as a separate unit, you have a stile (the upright board of the frame on the cabinet) on the sides of each of the cabinets. To create your layout in the above example, you will have a total of 8 stiles because each cabinet has one stile on each side. If each stile is 1 ½" wide, you would have a total width of 12" of stile material, plus your 2" filler strip for a total of 14".

However, if you were installing our custom-built cabinets on the same wall space, we would eliminate 3 stiles and the 2" filler strip, because we would build these cabinets as one long cabinet. This would create 6 ½" of additional usable space in your cabinets. It would also eliminate the need to fasten any cabinets together, and prevent any offsets where the cabinets are screwed together. This creates a much better appearance.