Cabinet Wood

Well, a few questions first.

Custom built cabinets or off the floor standard stuff?

Plywood carcass or particle board with real wood facing, doors and drawer fronts?

What kind of wood? Some hardwoods are more expensive than others.

Raised panel type doors or basic flat surfaced?

What type finish?

What type hardware?

Soft closing drawers and doors?

Sliding shelving?

For types of wood, there's oak, cherry, maple, cypress, birch, hickory can be used for drawer fronts, doors and face frames, ie, any exposed wood.

Most frames and shelving are made from plywood which is more stable than gluing up hardwood. Lots of the interior components like the actual drawers are made from poplar with drawer bottoms out of 1/4" plywood unless the drawer is real big, then they beef it up to at least 3/8".

Custom built cabinets they told me they use maple. They’re all soft closing, only a few have sliding shelving, paint finish and panel doors.

What was the price quoted, and is it a custom build?

quote:

---

Custom built cabinets they told me they use maple.

---

OK. So the face frames, drawer fronts and doors are solid maple. Well, the door frames should be but I'm pretty sure they will wind up using birch plywood for the inserts if there's no raised panel profile on them.

They are also probably using birch plywood for the carcass since birch and maple have very similar graining patterns and finish real close to one another if staining, but since you are painting, that is a moot point.

What you don't want is particle board carcasses with a very thin veneer on the exposed areas.

Be sure to ask what the carcass is being built out of before committing.

If you are painting the cabinets then why use maple at all. That seems overkill for painted cabinets.

You want maple because it is much harder than poplar. It will dent and scuff less over the years.