These are the absolute worst cabinets made in America today. Elkay has run this company into the ground. The finish is terrible. Spoke to a dealer today in NY who had to have his last 5 Yorktowne kitchens field repaired by a furniture refinisher. He said it was like watching new cars be refinished in a underground garage..ie the finish is never the same!! He said there should be a lemon law for companies like Elkay/Yorktowne. They make their own doors. They use a grade of wood known as #2 common random...the pink slime of the cabinet business. To maximize yield in their dimension mill use tiny scraps of wood, glue and piece them together such that the finished product looks like a crazy quilt of patched together wood. No matter what you do to it it looks like crap and they know it! Yorktowne is grossly OVER PRICED. Most dealers try to shove cheap flake board construction on you because they charge %16 more for plywood. Many other companies offer plywood standard and blow Yorktowne away in price and quality. The construction is a tale of two shitties. Substandard materials cobbled together in an inferior construction made by the Elkay corp an even shadier cabinet company. Don't take my word for it google "Yorktowne cabinet factory closing". You can view first hand Elkay's abysmal record of poor quality, union busting and mis-management. Look and feel inside the cabinet. It is held together by dozens of triangle shaped fasteners. If you are unafraid of ripping your finger open, then open a door and run your finger along the back of the face frame, where it meets the side panel. You will find dozens of sharp pointy nails sticking out for you and your children to rip your finger tips open with. These little finger slicers are clearly evident with double faced glass door cabinets. As if the abysmal Yorktowne finish were not enough. They announce to your friends, family and indeed to the world that you made the bone headed decision to purchase the higest priced lowest quality cabinet made in America. Alas, the poor decision to buy Yorktowne (or the equally high priced low quality Elkay sister company Medallion) was not yours alone. How were you to know that your cabinet sales person was being bribed by the Elkay/Yorktowne/Medallion corp to foist an overpriced low quality cabinet upon you. See CORRUPT SALES PRACTICES http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg102205095786.html Yorktowe/Elkay is so desperate that they pay dealer sales people kick backs of up to 30$ per cabinet to your cabinet sales person to steer you into a low quality high priced product where as most often is the case a lower cost higher quality alternative is availible. With a 30$ per cabinet kick back the average 20 cabinet kitchen with a 65% mark up means you are overpaying $990 Bribery, payola, kickbacks, and graft are the only way Elkay can sell this overpriced junk to you the unsuspecting consumer. I have seen countless "dream kitchens" ruined by this company. If a sales person tries to steer and manipulate you into this brand for his "kickback" than don't walk out of the showroom run..before it's too late.

Lots of useful points here, thanks. After doing some measuring, we would up tentatively deciding that we'll put in a 36" sink cabinet. We'd have so little room in a 24" cab around a garbage disposal (assuming same model we have now, and assuming the drain is in the center) that we'd be hard pressed to store trash under the sink. So with a 24" cabinet, we'd probably wind up losing 15" somewhere else to making a dedicated trash pull out. Thus it's actually efficient to just go to the 36" sink base. (The 30" doesn't work as well as 24 and 36 sizes, for various reasons involving window placement and ikea sizing.) If we stay with this decision, it seems we'll have a lot of latitude in selecting a sink size / configuration. I'll almost certainly go ahead and move to a larger sink - the question will be whether to maximize the potential of the large cabinet or keep the sink scaled to down a bit since the kitchen is smallish and the window in front of which the sink will be set is just 30". With the current cabinet choices open to me, my main work areas in the kitchen will be 33" to the right of the sink cabinet base, and 54-61" on the left of it. Plus however much smaller the sink opening is than the 36" span of the base cabinet. A little more prep space is always a good thing, but so is making dirty mixing bowls disappear.

You don't have to choose a painted finish. They have a ton of stains. Paint on cabinets isn't necessarily bad. I built a townhouse years ago and had painted cabinets. They never chipped in the 8 years I lived there and I definitely used the kitchen every day. They actually might have been Yorktowne. I would talk to the cabinet rep and express your concerns.

I don’t know where people get the idea that wood cabinets hide dirt, and therefor don’t get cleaned. I’ve seen that time and time again on this forum, dating back as long as I’ve been visiting this site...at least 20 years, waaay before Houzz took over, even before it was GardenWeb. For the old guard still around, I‘m talking about when Spike was running the show. Believe me when I tell you, I see every speck of dirt, and splatters on my wood cabs, that my DH has accumulated via his much appreciated cooking. Why is it that so many men don’t see dirt? Once a day, I venture to the kitchen to inspect and clean the cabinets. I don’t care what the surface of your cabinets is, dirt is going to be noticeable. It’s just a matter if you care enough to see it, and tend to it.