Cabinetry
Custom Cabinetry Boca Raton, FL
Custom cabinetry Boca Raton means boxes built to the walls you actually have, in the panel this coast asks for, instead of ordered in the widths a factory decided to carry.
- In your house
- 5–7 days
- From approved drawings
- 13–16 weeks
- Workmanship warranty
- 2 years
- License
- CGC1524886
- Licensed & insured: CGC1524886
- 350+ projects completed
- 2-year labor warranty
- Answered 7 AM–10 PM, 7 days
What the Word Custom Actually Buys
Custom cabinetry is cabinetry built after somebody measured your kitchen, to the dimensions your walls turned out to have. The old boxes come out. New ones go in, made for the wall they hang on, the ceiling they run up to and the appliances you already own. Nothing gets adapted to fit, because nothing existed before the measurement.
That is the whole of what custom buys, and it is worth saying plainly, because most of what gets sold as a reason to go custom describes a good cabinet rather than a custom one. Good factory cabinets exist and we install them. What a factory cannot do is build a box thirty three and a quarter inches wide because that is the distance between your pantry door and your refrigerator. If your kitchen has one gap like that, there are cheaper answers and we will name them. If it has four, custom is the only version that fits.
The second thing it buys is a specification you get to choose. A catalog cabinet comes as it comes: the panel, the drawer construction and the finish were decided by somebody who did not know your kitchen was three miles from the ocean. On a shop built run those are line items, and on this coast one of them decides how long the kitchen lasts.
When a Catalog Width Will Not Solve Your Kitchen
The room draws this line, not the budget. Here is where custom is the right call in a Boca Raton kitchen, and where we say so at the measurement even though it is the smaller sale. Cabinetry is the largest line inside the full kitchen remodels that make up most of our work, so what you are buying here is that same scope of work with the rest of the room left out.
The sizes you need are not sizes anybody sells. This is the most common reason by a wide margin. A kitchen laid out in 1978 was laid out to that room, in feet and inches nobody standardized. Stock cabinets come in fixed widths, so ordering to the nearest one leaves a gap at every wall and every appliance, closed with a strip of filler painted to match. One filler strip is a detail. Five of them is a kitchen that reads as almost right, and you will look at all five for the next twenty years.
The soffit is coming out. The boxed in bulkhead above your wall cabinets exists because the cabinets stop short of the ceiling. Take it down and the uppers have to grow to meet it, and a cabinet that changes height is a new cabinet, not a modified one. This is the most common way a smaller cabinet project turns into this one, and it usually gets discovered after somebody has already priced doors.
The boxes are finished, not just tired. Most cabinets in this market are particleboard. After three decades under a South Florida sink, the floor of that box has been through more wet and dry cycles than the panel was built for. Press it. If it gives, or if the screws holding the hinges turn without biting, doors have stopped being the question.
You want the room to do something it cannot. A real pantry where the twelve inch closet is. Deep drawers under the cooktop instead of a shelf you kneel to reach. A cabinet built around the column nobody can move. Those are not upgrades to a catalog cabinet, they are cabinets a catalog does not contain.
You are keeping the house. Custom is bought by the person who is staying. The panel behind the door is invisible to a buyer and obvious to you, every day, for as long as you cook in the room.
Where it is the wrong call, we say so with the smaller job sitting in front of us. First: the boxes are sound and the doors are what you cannot stand. Check the sink base, the back corners and the stile beside the dishwasher, and if all three are dry and firm you are looking at kitchen cabinet refacing, which replaces every door, drawer front and hinge for a fraction of a custom run. Second: you are selling inside a year. Third: you need the kitchen finished in under four months, because a custom run is thirteen to sixteen weeks from approved drawings and that clock is fabrication, not scheduling.
The Box, the Drawer and the Door Are Three Separate Purchases
A cabinet is three things bolted together, and they are built, priced and ruined separately. Most quotes describe one of the three in detail and stay quiet about the other two. Sorting out which is which is most of what makes three estimates comparable.
The box, which you never look at and which decides how long the kitchen lasts
The carcass carries the shelves, holds the hinge screws, takes the weight of your dishes and stays screwed to the wall. Here, the panel material outranks every other decision on this page. Particleboard and standard MDF are wood fiber pressed with resin, and they take on moisture through cut edges. In a kitchen the cut edges sit at the bottom of the box, closest to a mopped floor and to the two wettest appliances in the house. Once that edge swells it does not come back, and a swollen panel stops holding the screws that hold the hinges. Plywood is thin layers of real wood with the grain crossed layer to layer, so it moves less and a screw driven into it stays tight. Ask what the panel is, how thick it is, and what happens to the cut edges.
The drawer, where a shop either shows up or does not
You open the drawers thousands of times a year and the doors far less. A drawer box is either built or assembled: solid wood sides joined at the corner, a bottom captured in a groove on four sides, slides rated for the load. Or four pieces of particleboard stapled together with a bottom stapled underneath. Both look identical closed and full. The difference shows the first time the drawer carries a stack of plates, and again three years later when the bottom starts to sag.
The door and the face, which is the part everyone shops for
Framed cabinets carry a face frame across the front of the box. Frameless cabinets skip it and hang the doors off the box itself, which buys a couple of inches of opening and asks more of the panel behind it. Then the door: a five piece door is real stock cut into rails, stiles and a panel, and it is the one that reads as furniture. A slab door is one flat face and lives or dies on the finish.
Solid wood is also the part that moves, and where it was dried matters more here than in almost any other part of the country. The federal wood handbook is direct about it. Wood should be installed at the moisture content it will live at, so the seasonal swing after installation stays small, and its map of the United States puts the warm, damp coastal band at 11% average moisture content for interior woodwork, against 8% for most of the country and 6% for the dry Southwest. Doors dried to an inland number and trucked to Palm Beach County will move after you have paid for them. It is the first question worth asking any shop that says it builds locally.
How the Job Runs, From the Tape to the Walkthrough
- We measure the walls, not the room, at your house, free. Every wall gets checked for plumb, every floor for level, every opening for its own dimension. In a house from the seventies nothing is square, and a run built to a square drawing has to be forced into a room that is not.
- The layout conversation comes before the cabinet list. Where the mixer lives, whether two people can pass behind the dishwasher door, what the corner is going to hold, how the trash pull out and the oven door share the same aisle. A cabinet list written before that conversation is a list of boxes, not a kitchen.
- A written number before anything is built. One price, itemized: box material and thickness, drawer construction and slides, door style and finish, hinges, interior fittings, tear out and disposal of the old kitchen, installation, and the scribe work where the run meets the walls. It does not move unless you approve a change of scope.
- Shop drawings you approve, cabinet by cabinet. Every box on paper with its width, height and depth on it before a panel is cut. This is the step people skip, and then discover on installation day that two things want the same eighteen inches.
- The boxes get built while you keep cooking. Thirteen to sixteen weeks of fabrication, and nothing is torn out until the whole run is finished and in our shop. That is an operating rule rather than a scheduling preference, and it is why the disruption is days instead of months.
- Five to seven days of tear out and installation. The old cabinets and counters come out and go with us. Walls get checked and repaired where the old run was hiding something. New boxes are set, leveled, anchored into framing and scribed to the wall, so the run meets it without a filler doing the apologizing. Doors go on last and get adjusted until the gaps are even down the run.
- The countertop is templated on the installed boxes, then the walkthrough. The counter is measured off the real cabinets once they are set and level, never off the drawing. When it is in, we walk the kitchen with you and write down what is not right before we ask for the last payment.
What Custom Cabinetry Costs in Boca Raton
We start custom cabinetry at $18,000. That is a floor rather than a price: the smallest custom cabinet job we take on, set where building a run to your walls beats ordering one. Below it there are better answers and we name them at the measurement. What your kitchen costs does not exist until somebody has counted the boxes.
So next to our floor we publish the other kind of figure, which is what this market charges for the same work.
From $18,000, cabinetry only. Not ours but the market's: $500 to $1,200 per linear foot installed, or $15,000 to $40,000 for the cabinetry in a normal kitchen.
Those two numbers are not the same kind of thing. The bands are not ours but the market's, taken from published guides rather than from an average of our jobs. The $18,000 is ours, and it sits above the low end of those bands on purpose, because it is where we start and not the cheapest custom cabinet anybody in Palm Beach County will sell. We are also not multiplying the per foot rate by anything, because the number of linear feet in your kitchen is the one quantity nobody has measured yet.
What that figure covers, and what it does not
Cabinetry is boxes, drawers, doors, interior fittings, tear out of the old cabinets and installation, plus the hardware that makes a cabinet work. Hinges and drawer slides are part of the box and they are in the number. Knobs and pulls are a selection, so they carry an allowance rather than a promise: a pull can cost four dollars or forty. And cabinetry is not a kitchen. No countertop, no backsplash, no floor, no appliances, and none of the demolition and rebuild of anything that is not a cabinet.
What actually moves your number
The count of boxes first, then their sizes, then the panel. After that: how many drawer banks against how many doors, because a bank of drawers costs more than a door of the same width. Whether the run goes to the ceiling. The interior fittings, which add up faster than anything else on the list. And how far out of plumb your walls turn out to be, which nobody knows until the old run comes off.
Your zip code is not on that list. The price is the same in Boca Raton, Delray Beach and Parkland.
Permits and design are priced, never guessed. What a project needs is set by its scope and by which authority has jurisdiction over the property. Whatever permitting, drawings, engineering or design services yours turns out to require gets identified at the measurement and priced in the written estimate, before you approve anything.
Why This Work Ends Up With Us
We measure the walls, not the room, and we build to what we measured. In a house from 1978 the walls lean, the floors run downhill and the ceiling is not parallel to either. Buying custom and then installing it like stock throws away the entire premium.
The spec of the box goes into the estimate in writing. Most quotes name a door style and a finish and leave the box to your imagination, which is convenient, because the box is where an estimate gets cheap without looking cheap.
Nothing is torn out until the run is finished. Ask any company quoting you when demolition happens relative to fabrication. On a build this long, that one rule is the difference between four months of eating standing up and five to seven days of it.
Two years on the installation labor, in writing. The terms come with the contract, so you read what is covered before anything is scheduled.
One licensed company, and you can check it. The work is contracted by Gaven Constructions, Certified General Contractor CGC1524886, licensed, insured and bonded, and the number is searchable in the Florida DBPR licensee records without asking us for anything.
Licensed, Insured, and Permitted in Boca Raton
What pulls a cabinet job into review is that the boxes change size. A reface changes no dimension in the room. This one changes several at once. The sink base comes out, so the supply lines and the drain get disturbed and put back. Uppers that grow to the ceiling mean the soffit comes down, and what is inside a soffit here can be a duct, a vent or nothing at all. Undercabinet lighting or a wall oven cabinet is a circuit. Any one of those is a different conversation, and which office you have it with depends on whether the property sits inside the City of Boca Raton or in unincorporated Palm Beach County. We settle that before drawings are prepared and price the permitting before you approve the project.
The second thing is about the product rather than the permit, and it is easy to check on a quote. The composite panels inside cabinets are regulated for formaldehyde emissions under federal rule, and the rule reaches the finished cabinet and not only the raw sheet: it covers hardwood plywood, medium density fiberboard and particleboard, as well as household and other finished goods containing these products, and since March 2019 those products carry a label declaring compliance, certified by a third party the EPA recognizes. Ask to see it. A shop that buys certified panel has the paperwork and will hand it over.
If the kitchen is in a condominium or a country club community, the association is a second authority alongside the city or the county, and on a cabinet job it controls the part everybody forgets: the delivery. A finished run arrives in one load and has to come up in a reserved, padded elevator inside approved hours. That gets arranged before the boxes leave the shop, not the morning they arrive.
- License
- CGC1524886 Certified General Contractor, verifiable in the Florida DBPR licensee search.
- Insurance
- Licensed, insured and bonded Certificates are available before any work is scheduled.
- Labor warranty
- 2 years On installation labor. What it covers is written into your contract before any work is scheduled.
- Response time
- Within 24 hours Every inquiry gets an answer within one business day.
- Permits and design
- Priced before approval Requirements vary by project scope and by which authority has jurisdiction over the property. Any required permitting, drawings, engineering, or design services are identified and priced before the project is approved.
- Who contracts the work
- Gaven Constructions Kitchen Remodeler Boca Raton was acquired by Gaven Constructions, a licensed Florida contractor. Every estimate and invoice is issued by Gaven Constructions, which holds the license and carries the insurance on every job.
Common Questions
How much does custom cabinetry cost in Boca Raton?
Ours starts at $18,000 and covers cabinetry alone: no countertop, no backsplash, no floor and no appliances. Only the written itemized estimate after the measurement binds anybody, because until someone counts the boxes in your kitchen there is no total to quote.
How long does custom cabinetry take to build and install in Boca Raton?
Thirteen to sixteen weeks from the day you approve the drawings to the day the run is installed, and five to seven days of that with a crew in your house. The second number is the one that affects your life. The weeks are fabrication, and your existing kitchen keeps working through all of them, because nothing is torn out until the whole run is finished and in our shop. The countertop is templated on the installed boxes afterward and takes its own weeks, so plan for a stretch with cabinets and no counter.
Is custom cabinetry worth it in a Boca Raton kitchen, or are stock cabinets good enough?
Stock cabinets are good enough for a kitchen whose walls will take them, and that is the entire test. It has nothing to do with taste. So the question is not whether custom is better. It is how many inches of your kitchen would end up as filler, whether the corner and the pantry can be solved by anything on a catalog page, and whether the uppers have to reach a ceiling no stock height reaches. If all of that is no, buy stock and put the difference into the countertop. If two or three are yes, custom is the only version that fits.
Custom, semi custom or stock: what is the difference for a Boca Raton kitchen?
Stock cabinets were built before anybody knew about your kitchen, in a set of fixed widths, and you choose from what exists. Semi custom cabinets also come from a catalog of sizes, but you specify the finish, the door style, the hardware and some modifications inside a defined menu. Custom cabinets are built after your kitchen is measured, to whatever dimensions your walls turn out to have. What separates them is what happens at an odd dimension: stock and semi custom both solve one with a filler strip, and custom solves it by making the box that width. The word gets used loosely in retail, so ask whether the cabinet widths come from a list or from the measurement.
What cabinet material holds up best in Boca Raton humidity?
Plywood boxes with solid wood doors, drawer fronts and drawer sides, and the gap is wider here than it would be in a dry climate. Particleboard and standard MDF take on moisture through cut edges that usually go unsealed at exactly the wrong place, the bottom of the box. Plywood moves less because the grain is crossed layer to layer, and a screw driven into it stays tight. The other half of the answer is where the solid wood was dried, because wood installed at the wrong moisture content moves after it is in your kitchen.
Can I keep my countertop if I replace the cabinets in my Boca Raton kitchen?
Almost never, and it is worth planning around rather than hoping. A stone or quartz counter was templated on the cabinets it is sitting on, cut to those exact box positions and that exact overhang. It goes back only if the new boxes land in identical positions at an identical height, and the reason people buy custom is usually that the positions are changing. Even with an unchanged layout, lifting a slab that was glued and shimmed into place without cracking it is not something anybody can guarantee. Budget the counter as part of this project.
Do I need a permit to replace kitchen cabinets in Boca Raton?
Straight cabinet replacement inside the existing footprint, with nothing moving, often does not require one. The trouble is that a custom cabinet project rarely stays inside that description, and the parts that push it over the line are the ones nobody thinks of as regulated: the sink base coming out, the soffit opening up, a circuit added for a wall oven or undercabinet lighting. Which office reviews it also depends on whether your address falls inside the City or in unincorporated Palm Beach County. We find out at the measurement and price it in the estimate, in writing, rather than publishing a table that tells you which side of the line your kitchen falls on.
Recent Kitchen Remodeling Projects in Boca Raton
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Kitchen opened to the living room, with a seated island Open concept kitchen remodeling -
Full-height cabinetry and a waterfall island Luxury kitchen remodeling -
Galley kitchen in a condo, under twenty linear feet Small kitchen remodel -
New shaker fronts on the original boxes Kitchen cabinet refacing
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Floor-to-ceiling run with a tall pantry Custom cabinetry -
Quartz with a waterfall end on the island Quartz countertop installation -
Granite perimeter with a raised breakfast bar Granite countertop installation -
Counters at two heights, open underneath Accessible kitchen remodeling
Cabinetry is usually the largest line in a project rather than the whole of it, and how it fits against countertops, permits and the rest of the schedule is laid out on Kitchen Remodeler Boca Raton.
Walk your kitchen with a tape and tell us the two things that do not fit.
The corner nothing reaches into, the pantry that is really a twelve inch closet, the four inches of dead wall beside the refrigerator. Tell us those and roughly how many feet of cabinet you have, and we will tell you whether this is a custom job or whether you are about to buy new boxes to fix something new doors would have fixed.