Custom Cabinets in White Oak, TX

Kitchen cabinets, built-ins and storage for White Oak — replacing builder-grade units that have worn out, and adding the storage the house never came with.

Builder-grade cabinets have a lifespan

Most kitchens in White Oak came with the house, and in a town built out largely after the war and through the decades since, that means a great many kitchens installed to a builder's budget. Those units are not badly made exactly, but they are made to a price — thin carcass material, drawer boxes stapled rather than jointed, runners rated for a fraction of what a family actually loads into them.

They last about fifteen to twenty years of hard use, and then they start failing all at once: drawer bottoms dropping, hinges pulling out of particle board, door faces swelling where water has got into the edge. That is usually when people call, and it is a good moment to call, because there are two very different answers and only one of them costs a lot.

Which of the two answers you need

If the carcasses are sound, new doors and drawer fronts with proper hardware and a refinish transforms the kitchen for a fraction of a rebuild. If the carcass material itself has gone — and in builder-grade particle board, once water is in it, it has — then replacing fronts on a failing box is money thrown away.

Telling those apart takes five minutes standing in the kitchen and it decides everything about the cost. We will say plainly which one you have, including when the answer is the cheap one.

The storage the house was never given

The other half of the work here is adding what was left out. A pantry run deep enough to be useful. A mudroom bench with hooks, cubbies and somewhere for boots. Laundry cabinetry so the room is not a corridor with a machine in it. Garage and workshop storage that holds weight. A built-in desk run for whoever now works from home. Window seats with storage under.

That work is less glamorous than a kitchen and it changes a family house more, because it is what stops everything living on the floor.

Built to a different standard, deliberately

What we build is not builder-grade. Carcasses in plywood rather than particle board, drawer boxes jointed rather than stapled, runners rated for real loads, and doors that will not swell at the bottom edge the first time something spills. It costs more than the original units did and it is meant to be the last set the house needs.

Questions we get from White Oak