How tall would the toe kick be if you just raised them up?

I agree with HandyMac: just reuse the face frames on new boxes. It's likely they're built in place, and you wouldn't be able to tear them out in one piece to raise them anyway.

Pictures please - I wanna see!

Original 100 yr cabinets in their original setting - extremely rare, at least around these parts. Used to see them occasionally, back in the day. Back before the easy credit of the 90s did a number on old houses and so many original kitchens, windows, doors, etc. ended up in the landfill and so many houses took on that blah beige vinyl look.

Now - original cabs of that era and styleare just about impossible to find. You occasionally see some in architectural salvage places commanding top dollar, depending on condition and quality. Hardly ever in a house for sale - out of hundreds of online listings I mustve browsed in the last 10 yrs I probably only saw 1 or 2 original 100 yr old kitchens and they weren't even very good or very well cared for specimens. Actually a lot of old kitchens of that period didn't even have much built in cabinetry.

You asked for pro's and con's and a con would be that you are altering the architectural value of your house, and consequently maybe even the value in terms of dollars and cents.

Not saying flat "don't do it," just saying tread lightly & use the same critical judgement with your house parts as if you were considering altering a piece of rare antique furniture or collector car. Do your research and due diligence to get all the details right and make sure the carpenter is wholely on board with using period correct methods and techniques and materials - you may want to interview several and see samples of their work.

I would reuse hardware and use the existing shelves and wood to create the rebuilt boxes - with additional vintage wood if needed or at least same species of wood as the original shelves etc.

IMHO, you don't want only the "look" of the original cabinets. You want the original cabinets, period.... with modifications to enable more comfortably use- people are taller now, no getting around that.

No Im not always a purist or stickler for details - if you were like many of us whose houses have been futzed with to some degree or another, then I would not hesitate to say "have at it." But it sounds like you may have something worth being a stickler about...?

One section can be brought foward for dishwasher and a wall facuet used over sink.

OP,gosh I hope I didn't scare you away! Don't worry, I wont send the old house purist police over to your house LOL Still would love to see the original kitchen if you're so inclined -?

Not exactly the same thing, but I'm renting a 1900 house. The kitchen cabinets were built in place, my guess around 1930 or 1940. The counter was 2 inches too low for most dishwashers. But someone, at some point, managed to wedge one in there somehow.

When it broke, my landlord pulled it out, and discovered someone had removed the floorboards to make enough room, and the dishwasher was resting on the floor joists.

Her handyman came in and put in a new floor, then raised the countertop by adding wood on top of the cabinets. He painted all the cabinet fronts so everything matched and really, unless you know the work was done, you don't notice it at all. And it made the counter height more convenient, and the sink is at a better height. The one drawback was that the upper cabinets are now too close to the counter for a coffee machine to fit under them. (Which might be a problem if I drank coffee, but I don't. )

I have great inset cabinets probably built in the 1920s. I would not tear them apart, but I appreciate the modification done to the middle cabinet to bring it out far enough to incorporate a sink that was done by a previous owner. I did without a dishwasher until a couple of years ago when we opened up the back porch wall, allowing us to put in an island. The dishwasher is in the island, directly across from the sink and this set up works well.

I didn't want to lose part of a cabinet just to have a dishwasher, but we could have done that by raising the countertop height as xarcady described.

The problem with just reusing the face frames is that the cabinets were likely not built as individual boxes, but as an entire row so the "face frame" is contiguous across several cabinets. Its tricky to get this off in one piece without breaking it, and trickier still to try to build individual boxes behind it.

We would probably do what you suggest -- remove the cabinets as a until and reinstall them them up and out. Why you have them out, strip all the old paint/varnish in and refinish them. If the new height results in taller than 6" toe kicks, you might consider toe-kick drawers for more storage.

The old drawers are probably useless, so just salvage the drawer fronts for reuse and have your cabinetmaker fabricate additional drawer fronts to match along with the new drawers you will need.

Good luck. This is not going to be easy.