Cabinet Installation in Minneapolis

Cabinet installation is setting, leveling and fastening cabinet boxes to the walls and floor, then hanging the doors and hardware, and Top Notch Floors does it in kitchens, baths and laundry rooms across Minneapolis. We install what you bought or what we ordered. Either way it goes in straight.

Stock cabinets come in fixed sizes off a shelf and cost the least. Semi-custom starts from stock boxes and lets you change door style, finish, depth and a few sizes, which covers most kitchens well. Custom is built to your dimensions, so odd walls, tall ceilings and unusual runs all get used. Custom takes six to ten weeks to arrive and you plan the job around that.

Framed cabinets have a face frame around the front of the box. They are the traditional American build, forgiving to install and easy to trim out. Frameless — full-access, sometimes called European — skips the frame, so you get more usable space and wider drawers. Frameless also punishes sloppy work. Every door sits flush next to its neighbor, so a box that is out an eighth of an inch shows immediately.

In an older Minneapolis house, the walls decide the job. Plaster over lath is wavy. Corners are rarely 90 degrees. Floors slope toward the middle of the house after a century of settling. That is why shimming and scribing matter more than which cabinets you bought. We shoot a level line first, set the highest point of the floor as the reference, shim every box to that line, and scribe the end panels and fillers to the actual wall so there is no gap to caulk.

Cabinets get screwed into studs, not into drywall anchors. Uppers carry real weight once they are loaded with dishes, and we hit framing at every stud along the run. Boxes get screwed to each other through the stiles so the whole run acts as one unit.

Soft-close hinges and drawer glides are standard on most new cabinets and worth adding to older ones. They are a cheap upgrade and they stop the doors from banging.

Crown molding at the ceiling and light rail under the uppers are what make an installation look finished. Filler strips close the gaps at walls and at the end of a run. Those pieces get cut on site, because no wall is straight enough to trust a shop measurement.

If your boxes are solid and only the doors look dated, refacing is the cheaper move. New doors, drawer fronts and veneer over the existing frames costs a fraction of new cabinets and takes days instead of weeks.

Need vanities or a linen tower too? The same crew does bathroom cabinetry and tops, so it all matches.