Custom Cabinets in Gladewater, TX

Kitchen cabinets, built-ins and shop fittings for Gladewater — made to fit the opening you actually have, in houses and storefronts that were never square to begin with.

A railroad town, and the houses show it

Gladewater was laid out by the Texas and Pacific Railway in 1873, and the tracks still run straight through the middle of downtown. Then the 1931 oil strike turned it into a hub of the East Texas field, and a second wave of building went up on top of the first. When the oil thinned in the seventies the town moved into furniture, clothing, paper products, boats and timber before the antique trade took hold in the nineties.

What that leaves is housing stock spanning a century and a half, most of it predating any standard cabinet dimension. Factory cabinets come in fixed widths in three-inch steps; a kitchen in a 1930s Gladewater house does not oblige. Building to the opening you actually have is the difference between a kitchen that fits and one that was made to fit.

Often the boxes are sound and only the fronts are tired

A lot of what we are asked to look at does not need tearing out. In houses of this age the carcasses are frequently solid timber and perfectly good, and it is the doors, drawer runners, handles and finish that have had their day. New fronts, new hardware and a proper refinish gets a different kitchen for a fraction of a rebuild, and we will tell you when that is the honest answer for yours.

Storefronts on the antique blocks

Downtown Gladewater's shops are the town's living, and fitting one out is not a domestic kitchen with a bigger budget. Counters take real punishment. Display joinery has to suit a period frontage rather than fight it, which matters twice over in a district whose whole appeal is that it looks its age. And the walls in a building that old are never plumb, so the work gets scribed in rather than shimmed and hidden.

We take that work — counters, back-of-house storage, display fitments and checkout runs — and we would rather quote it standing in the shop than off a drawing.

Built-ins for the rest of the house

Office built-ins with a desk run and cupboards over. Mudroom benches with hooks and cubbies. Laundry cabinetry. Window seats with storage under. Bookcases fitted into an alcove so they read as original to the house. Garage and workshop storage. Bar units and corner cabinets, including wet ones with a sink cut in.

Fifteen minutes away

The shop is in Kilgore. Cabinetry is measured in person, built here and fitted by the same people who built it — walls in houses this old are rarely square, and that gets built in rather than discovered on fitting day.

Questions we get from Gladewater