I work in a custom cabinet shop, and we always adjust our doors and drawer fronts after installation until the customer is content. Also, over time and due to humidity and weather around here, sometimes things will end up shifting and doors and drawer fronts can end up being out of alignment as a result of that...we always go back and re-adjust things as needed. Your cabinet maker should want to keep you happy! I'm sure he'll accommodate you! Pam

alku05 - Thanks for the pictures! I can see why you needed to do it "both ways" and it looks fine. And by the way - your floors are beautiful! sweeby - We definitely are dealing with #2 (an applied door panel) but the question is how it should line up with the door or drawer that it meets on the front side of the cabinet. Some of ours are flush with the door so that the panel and the door form a perfect 90 degree angle where they meet while others stop at the edge of the cabinet. I wish I could take a picture but we've stopped installing them for now until we figure out if we need to order something different so that they're all the same. If anyone else has any pictures to share - that would be great!

Thinking solely in terms of standard factory sizes for kitchens is one of the most common mistakes homeowners (and kitchen designers) make when remodeling kitchens. this sort of "in the box" thinking stems from the assumption that custom cabinets must cost more than factory cabinets because, after all, they are custom cabinets. Not always so. Our fully custom cabinets, with installation, cost about 20% less than mid-range Home Depot cabinets with installation. How can that be? Easy, we don't have the giant HD markup and we don't ship cabinets halfway across the country. Most of our customers are local. Our shop is just as efficient as the big factories -- after all, there is only so much automation that can be applied to cabinetmaking. No matter how big the factory, it is still a hand-on business not amenable to an automobile-type assembly line fabrication. We all have the same machinery, ours is just smaller in scale. But, our CNC machines work just the same way as Omega Cabinetry's CNC machines and are just as efficient. Large factories have an advantage of scale, which lowers some costs, but we have the advantage of not having massive shipping charges for transporting large quantities of air. Shipping a typical assembled sink cabinet means shipping a shell wrapped around six cubic fee of air. This air takes of volume, and shipping charges are based on volume and weight. We don't pay those, and so wipe out any advantage of scale the large factories enjoy, and then some. So we are very price competitive. But, what we provide that the large factories cannot, or do not, except at what we believe are rather excessive extra charges, is precision fitting. If your space requires a 22-11/16" cabinet, that's what we build. Not a standard 21" cabinet with a 1-11/16" filler strip. So, back to the actual topic, deeper cabinets: To make a 30" deep cabinet requires sides that at 6" wider than a standard 24" cabinet. The front and back are the same. A 24" wide 34.5" tall 30" deep cabinet is still 24" wide across the front and still 34.5 inches tall. If we cut a 24" side, we have 24" left in a standard 48" plywood panel, so we can cut the other side out of the same panel. If we cut a 30" side, we only have 18" left. What can we do with that? Well, we can cut out the 15" side for the upper cabinet, and still have minimal waste. So the material cost of making a 30" cabinet rather than a 24" cabinet is about the same. How about hardware? Everyone knows that the hardware to extend a drawer in a 30" cabinets costs more than the harware required for a 24" cabinet. And, they're right. Drawer glides for a 30" cabinet are heavy duty glides that will support up to 150 lbs., compared to 75 lbs for a standard glide, and they cost twice as much. We pay about $58.00 for a pair of glides and accessories vs $27 for a 24" cabinet a $31.00 difference per drawer. The cabinet cost for a typical small kitchen is about $12,000, installed. If you use 30" cabinets throughout with 15 drawers, you will pay about $465.00 extra for glides. This is whopping a 4% price increase. Who can afford that? Deal breaker for sure! For the additional storage and added convenience of deeper cabinets, this should be a no brainer. If our cabinet cost is about the same, and it is, and glides a very modest additional amount, the only concern left is countertops, and the cost of these is much more likely to depend on the material selected than size. So, cost should not be a factor, and if it is a factor, you have selected the wrong cabinetmaker. If you are like most homeowners, you are only going to remodel your kitchen once. So, you should do everything possible to make sure that this once-in-a-lifetime project is exactly right, which means the cabinets are exactly the right height -- not always 36", in fact rather seldom 36" high -- and exactly fit your space and your needs. Giving up utility and function because your cabinetmaker cannot or will not make what you need except for an excessive extra charge is just plain nuts.

"A flush install with full overlay cabinets would be weirdly recessed since it’s even with the faceframe and not the doors." My Ikea cabinet doors (for example) are 3/4" thick. The Sharp microwave door is about 1-1/4" thick. I don't see why 1/2" of material couldn't be cut from the top and upper portion of the side, front edges of the cabinet to accommodate the recessed "spaceframe". The oven would the be pushed into and attached to the spaceframe. The installed oven front would then be flush with the surrounding 3/4"-thick cabinet doors and drawers.