Shop notes · 2026-10-03

What an installer checks before hanging kitchen cabinets you bought somewhere else

The cabinets are paid for. Maybe they came from a home center, maybe from an online order, and right now they are a stack of cartons in the garage with your name on the packing slip. What you need is someone to put them on the wall. Most of what decides how that goes gets settled before the installer ever walks in, in what showed up on the truck and what the order left out.

Will a cabinet shop install cabinets it did not build?

Yes. Installing cabinets someone else made is its own job, quoted on its own, and it is part of our kitchen cabinet installation in Fremont. To price it we need three things from you: the layout drawing the seller made, the box list or order confirmation, and photos of the kitchen as it stands, including the ceiling line and the wall behind the current uppers.

The drawing tells us where every box is supposed to go. The box list tells us what you actually own, which is not always the same thing. The photos show what the drawing never knew about.

There is one real difference between a cabinet shop and a crew that only hangs boxes. When something is missing or does not fit, a shop can make the part. A panel, a filler, a short box for a gap the drawing did not account for. That matters more with an order than with a kitchen we built, since the seller drew it from measurements and never saw the walls.

What should you check when the cabinets are delivered?

Count every carton against the layout drawing the day it arrives, then open them. Look for crushed corners, dents in the face frame and scratches in the finish while the delivery is fresh enough to report. The seller’s own policy decides how long you have, so read it before the cartons go into storage.

A few things catch people out:

Doors and drawer fronts often ship in separate cartons from the boxes they belong to, sometimes on a different day. A base cabinet with no doors in its carton is not necessarily short.
Hardware bags (hinges, shelf pins, mounting rails) can be taped inside one carton for the whole order. Find it before the cardboard goes out with the recycling.
The label on the end of the carton and the label on the box inside do not always agree. Check the cabinet, not the cardboard.
Damage to a cabinet back or the underside of a sink base is easy to miss and easy to live with. A cracked face frame or a dented door edge is neither.

Photograph anything wrong before you move it. Keep the packing slip with the drawing.

Do flat-pack cabinets have to be put together before the installer comes?

Ready-to-assemble cabinets arrive as flat panels, and assembly is a separate step from installation. Someone has to build each box before it can be hung. Ask whether assembly is in your installation quote or left to you, and decide where the built boxes will wait, since they take up far more floor than the flat cartons did.

If you assemble them yourself, the one thing that matters is square. A box put together slightly out of square hangs slightly out of square, and the door on it never sits even with its neighbor no matter how the hinges get adjusted. Measure each box corner to corner both ways before the glue sets or the last screw goes in. The two numbers should match.

Where they wait matters too. A Fremont garage is humid in August and freezing in January, and particleboard sitting directly on a concrete slab can wick moisture up into its bottom edge. Set the cartons on scrap boards or a pallet, or move them into a spare room or the basement if there is space.

Which trim pieces are missing from most cabinet orders?

A layout drawing shows boxes. The pieces that make a run of boxes look built in are often extra line items, or missing from the order altogether. Before install day, check the order for each of these:

filler strips, enough for every spot where a box meets a wall or an appliance
scribe molding for the edges where cabinets meet uneven walls and ceilings
toe kick to cover the base of every run
finished end panels anywhere the side of a box shows, such as the end of a run or beside the refrigerator
crown molding, and light rail under the uppers if the look calls for it
the end panel beside a dishwasher at the end of a run, which gives the countertop something to rest on
knobs and pulls, which most orders treat as a separate purchase

The drawing also assumes the walls are flat, the corners are square and the floor is level. In a lot of older Fremont houses, at least one of those is off, and fillers and scribe are what close the difference.

Who takes the old cabinets out, and what turns up behind them?

Tear-out can be part of the installation quote or a separate job, so ask. Either way, the wall behind the old cabinets is the first thing anyone sees that the seller’s drawing never accounted for, and a few decisions need making before the first upper comes down.

Behind the old uppers there is usually a rectangle of unpainted wall. The new uppers may not cover the same footprint, so somebody has to patch and paint the strip that shows. Old backsplash tile tends to bring a layer of drywall with it when it comes off.

Then there is the bulkhead. Plenty of kitchens built a few decades ago have a soffit boxed in over the uppers, and taller new uppers may not clear it. Sometimes it is empty and can come out. Sometimes it carries a duct or a vent pipe and stays. Finding out which before tear-out keeps you from a kitchen with the old cabinets gone and the new ones not fitting.

Last, decide what happens to the old cabinets. Hauled away, kept for the garage, or set aside for someone who wants them.

What happens when a box does not fit the wall it was ordered for?

Usually one of three fixes. A filler gets ripped to the exact width of the gap. An end panel gets scribed to follow a wall that bows. Or, when the miss is bigger, a short section of the run gets rethought. Which one depends on how far off the box is and where the gap lands.

Ordered cabinets come in set widths, and a wall rarely lands on one of those numbers. There is more on why stock cabinets come in fixed widths in the comparison of cabinet tiers.

Where a shop earns its place is the gap no filler can hide. We can build a matching end panel, a narrow pullout or a small box in the order’s finish and door style. How close that match comes depends on the finish. A painted color or a common stain on maple or oak can usually be matched well. A factory finish with a printed grain, a glaze or a thermofoil wrap often cannot, and we will tell you that before building anything.

How do you tell a wrong order from a bad install?

Check the drawing before blaming the hanging. The order is the problem when the drawing itself was wrong: an appliance opening sized for a different range or refrigerator, a sink base whose back does not clear the drain and supply lines, uppers ordered too tall for the ceiling once crown is added. No amount of careful hanging fixes those. Some of it goes back to the seller, and an installer should say so before hanging anything.

The appliance opening is the one to measure first. Check the spec sheet of the appliance you actually own or plan to buy against the opening on the drawing, width and height both, before a single box goes up. Refrigerators especially need room for the doors to swing past the cabinet beside them.

The sink base is the other one. Measure where the drain and supply lines come out of the wall against the back of the cabinet before it goes in. If they land where the cabinet has a shelf rail or a solid back, it is better to know while the seller can still swap it.

If enough of the order turns out wrong that you are weighing a return against building part of it new, the comparison of buying versus building cabinets lays out that decision.