Mark Mitten  0:02  
Are you thinking of having a friend build custom kitchen cabinets for friends who might drop dead and leave you with no warranty? You better call

Paul McAlary  0:17  
Hello, Richard, can you hear me?

Richard  0:18  
Yes, I can. Thank you.

Paul McAlary  0:20  
Welcome to better call Paul, or calls with Paul, I guess is our official title. We spoke earlier in the week. And you've sent me a very, very detailed set of plans for your whole house that you're building, along with a long email about things that you're considering and things that you want to do. So we have a lot of information to work with. So thanks for doing all that.

Richard  0:44  
I hope it's helpful.

Paul McAlary  0:45  
So then the question is, where do you want to start, maybe the best place to start for you will be just to start generally. And then to get more specific. As we go. I look at your plans. And the first thing I think of because you really we talked about it earlier, but you really want to reinvent the wheel. So you want to make cabinets, unusual sizes, unusual designs, and things that you created. So you would have to be in custom cabinets to do this. But the first thing is, what's your budget for cabinetry? Do you have one yet?

Richard  1:25  
Well, that's what I'm I am, I am submitting the plans to a professional estimator, who I met with last week, less, I'm submitting the plans already to my general contractor, and they are going to come back with some estimates for me. But the let's just say that the first thing I want to find out how much what range it costs for me to do what I want, and then I will figure out how to come up with the money. I've got a I've got a generous budget in general to build the house. But the kitchen area that level two is one of the premier areas that I care about because it's going to be built for entertaining.

Paul McAlary  2:15  
Okay, so I would say good for you that you're not in California, or, or Boston, because your cabinetry that you've got laid out here would be over $100,000 in cabinetry in those areas. Where are you located? Again, you're outside of Atlanta.

Speaker 3  2:36  
No, I'm right. In Atlanta, I'm in the city, right? Right across this. So right in the middle of Atlanta.

Paul McAlary  2:42  
I'm not as familiar with Atlanta. But I would think that in Atlanta, you're still going to be looking at with the cabinetry the way you've done. If you keep especially all of the extra deep bass cabinets to wall cabinets, I'm not even sure where you are. There's nothing you can't do. But it's problematic when you make wall cabinets deeper than maybe 13 or 14 inches. If you do some of these things that you're thinking about doing. You're definitely probably over $60,000 in cabinetry. The question is, if that's freaking you out, then there's ways to go down quickly in price, and it's to change the design. It's not

Richard  3:25  
freaking me out. Okay.

Paul McAlary  3:27  
So if that's not freaking you out, then we can move on. Because you know, that's what we do with our own customers is if we're remotely close to your budget or whatever, there's things you can tweak and things you can change to make it less this things you'll probably find out when you're doing this that you'll want to spend more on maybe, but if the the initial just giving you a guesstimate, it doesn't freak you out, then we can move on. And then from looking at the things that you planned on, you want to do a Shaker door style. And yes, you're sort of going for a little bit more of a contemporary look. I would say that the Shaker door style isn't necessarily the shaker doorstop can be anything you can design a kitchen with Shaker Doors, and it can be contemporary it cannot be contemporary. But you also want to do frameless cabinets instead of framed cabinets and the Shaker door style doesn't necessarily require you to be in a frameless brand. A frameless brand if you're getting a slab door style is almost a necessity because there'll be just a oh you know close to a half inch gap between the doors cabinet the cabinet that won't look as good, but that look isn't destroyed in a shaker. And when you're reinventing the wheel as you're trying to do here with lots of different things your life will be a lot easier in a framed cabinet brand than a frameless so it's just something for you to consider. Because frameless are not quite as durable. you're requesting the most durable cabinets and that's important to you? Well, you can only reach a certain level of durability in a frameless cabinet and certainly doing things like the wall cabinets 18 inches deep and everything else when you don't have a solid wood frame on the front of the cabinets, and the the face frames of the cabinets aren't really being screwed to each other cabinet, the cabinet. And all of those things lend themselves to making it easier to put cabinets under stress. And also install cabinets that frameless cabinetry doesn't do, it's something that you might want to consider to only because why don't we just talk about your wall cabinets when you make the wall cabinets 18 inches deep, then on a frameless cabinet or even on a frame on any cabinet, then the foot more of the weight of the cabinet is forward. And the only thing holding the cabinet to the walls are screws on the back of the cabinets. Obviously, if you made wall cabinets, very deep at some point, they're just going to fall off the walls, right. So you know when you're making cabinets anywhere deeper than 15 inches, you can't just screw them to the wall, you will need to have some kind of system. If you're going to really make your wall cabinets 18 inches deep with the cabinets are not just screw to the back to the wall, but also screw to the ceiling. Cabinets would not hold up over time just hanging on a wall if they were coming out 18 inches. So that's something else to consider. And then the base cabinets that you're doing. You know, if you're doing cabinets that are deeper than deeper than 13 inches for a wall cabinet is going to cost you 25% More but deeper than 24 inches for a base cabinet. You have all kinds of problems with that with rollouts, and things like that, but you probably weren't planning on making the base cabinets 30 Were you just thinking you'd move just build a wall and back of the base cabinets? And then pull them forward? No,

Speaker 3  7:03  
no, no, no, no, no, I want to let me let me just share something with you my my folks built from the time I was two and a half to the time I was 16. My parents built five homes, new homes that would family lived on. And I noticed things I liked and I noticed things I didn't like. And then by the time I was like, kind of think like 18 years old, I had lived in 11 states. So I'd lived in apartments when I was on my own, I noticed all kinds of things. The first thing I noticed is that the countertops, there's a growing proliferation of countertop clutter, that's coming from devices that didn't exist forever, you know, so you're getting countered to all kinds of things. So

Paul McAlary  7:54  
let me just stop you. So you notice that you'd like you think you'd like to have extra space and back of your countertops, I would tell you don't even contemplate trying to make cabinets deeper than base cabinets deeper than 24, you can accomplish what you want with building a wall and back to the cabinets. But the tracks and the pull outs and everything else don't really exist. You have to operate in the world, the rest of us live in Richard. And if you hire a company to do this, like there are Amish people here that might attempt this. And they would build your thing custom based on your own specifications. If you work with a company like that, that's a terrible, terrible, terrible idea, in my opinion, because you don't have any engineers. You don't have any people that know what they're doing. They're building to your specifications and your specifications. You don't really know what you're doing, essentially, right, you have ideas, but you haven't tried and tested these ideas over time. Even just one cabinet 30 inch cabinet to pantry cabinets we had a customer insist on recently, they doubled the price of the pantry cabinets, finding the rollouts was almost impossible. And each pantry cabinet was $3,000 in an inexpensive cabinet brand. And I don't think they're even going to work. But we did it because a customer sort of insisted on but it's just in general, I yelled at the designer over it quite a bit. It's a bad idea, inventing things on your own. If the cabinet company will do it. That's fine. If the cabinet company doesn't do that thing, generally, you don't want to invent it yourself. It's hard to invent things. That's why there's patents and everything else. When you invent stuff and you're just the first person doing it. It's very problematic, but it's easy to make. If you want to pull cabinets forward. You can pull base cabinets forward and then use the same belongs and and or you know Hezbollah or The kind of tracks and garbage can pull outs and everything else in the world is going to function fine, because they're all made to be the depth that the normal base cabinet is. Same thing with the base cabinet height. People that want to build base cabinets higher than normal because they're tall or something like that opened a can of worms, because appliances have built certain sizes and everything else. They're not experienced enough to think their way through, I would discourage you from even contemplating 30 inch bass cabinets. So

Speaker 3  10:32  
I can tell you the part of the thinking the 30 inch deep countertop by putting if I did, which, because I do prefer deeper than 24 cabinets underneath there. Because Because for the same space on the wall, if if it was possible to put deeper drawers in there, you get about 25% More storage in the drawer, if you can do that. I've I've found there are some to your point, the slides, I understand the cost issue, I completely understand that. And

Paul McAlary  11:10  
no one else has worked with these slides. But from having an engineering background from an Ivy League college, the more of an inventor you are, the more you realize it's hard to invent. And I would never attempt this. And so someone that doesn't have my experience should never attempt it either. It's much harder, just the rollouts, we found rollouts to work in a 30 inch cabinet. They're rated to 500 pounds, which is wonderful, but they won't be the same soft closed tracks and no one who's using them will have ever installed them in a cabinet before. So everybody that's doing this is doing this from scratch. And it just it's a recipe for disaster. And then even you know, when you pull these rollouts out as they get deeper, you have the same problem, that that's why they have to be rated for 500 pounds, because when they're cantilever it out so far, because they're so deep, they have to hold up that much more. And in a frameless cabinet, it would just be ludicrous because if you put any kind of weight on these things, and you pull them out 30 inches, you don't have the advantage of a framed cabinet that the tracks are being attached to a solid wood frame, your tracks at best are attached to plywood on the sides. So as soon as you put a whole bunch of stuff on these things, and then you pull them out 30 inches, the stress that the pullout is under by cantilever ring out farther, the tracks will rip out of the sides of a frameless cabinet. So engineering oil cabinet, it's impossible really.

Speaker 3  12:44  
Okay, first of all, thank you. Secondly, has anyone ever study that cuz you brought up the fact of the education and engineering background, my dad was a mechanical engineering graduate, Georgia Tech I had where I am right now, seven years ago, I had a friend of mine who's a woodworking guy who builds furniture for restaurants. I wanted to I have a 30 inch deep counter with cubby holes above it in my office studio currently. And I had the lower cabinet which is 30 inch deep countertop, I had him put accuride brands, brand full extension to hold a pretty good size printer here. And I've been using it for seven years. And he's he'd never done it before. But he said the same thing that you did. I mean, and however you use the word that I think is critical, and that is the you're talking about the word engineering. So if a normal cabinet manufacturer or even a custom manufacturer does what I want, but they don't have the engineering experience and expertise to see something's gonna fall off. If they don't reinforce it, then then how could I go about still exploring it and finding someone that had engineering

Paul McAlary  14:12  
because custom cabinet makers, if you didn't make ask them to do these things, once you go outside what they're normally used to making, they will let you hang yourself, they will do it and they just won't warranty it because they're not going to do an engineering study for your particular one job. That's silly to even think that somebody would do it for one person's property. You have to trust the people that have been doing it for a long period of time. And that one thing that you've got the printer that pulls out farther or whatever that's good that's one success is that frameless cabinets that he did it into

Speaker 3  14:50  
its I mean look it's it's like boxes next to each other that are let me open up Another frame.

Paul McAlary  15:01  
Yeah, so you'll also get an A cabinet brand that the weight of the thing that pulls out the tracks is being transferred to the face frame of the cabinet, which is 1000 times stronger than a frameless cabinet so that the point track is attached on the sides going into solid wood. That's so much longer than just having screws that are going across in plywood, we're assuming you're going to be able to deploy wood because we're in the bottom cabinets going to be wooden. So you could do plywood. If your bottom cabinets were some kind of white laminate or something like that, you probably would need to do your besides that your cabinets and a frameless line and particle board so that the laminate and everything else would match. And then it would even be that much worse. Why don't we move on, I would just encourage you don't. Okay, you can get really close to the things that you want. But if you're really just trying to advance stuff as you go along, you'll have the satisfaction of having done it yourself. But that will be the good news and the bad news will be stuff will fall apart easily, you'll have all kinds of problems that nobody will anticipate. So if you stay within the things that the brand is okay, doing, you're going to have to get custom cabinets. But if you stay within a major brand, and a regular kitchen designer that you're ordering from people will make your paint between the lines. So when you strive to paint outside the lines, then someone will come back they'll say to you, we don't make cabinets, wall cabinets past 15 inches deep, we'll make them for you. But you'll have to support them from above or whatever. Certainly, if you go past 15 inches, you definitely have to support your wall cabinets from the ceiling as well, because they'll sag over time, just like some people don't know any better. And they the cabinets over refrigerator usually come at two feet. And they won't put the panels on the side of the refrigerator that support the wall cabinet over the refrigerator. And they fall off the wall all the time on people. That's a common thing. It means that the designer that did it when no customer that and the contractor that installed it, nobody really knew what they were doing, they put a wall cabinet hanging 24 inches out with no support on the front of the cabinet.

Speaker 3  17:15  
Well, I'm hearing first of all, thank you for I can I can tell your experience is valuable. Because I'm already thinking of it, I need to look at framed anyway, based on everything that you've said so far. So thank you,

Paul McAlary  17:29  
oh, it doesn't hurt. And it doesn't cost you anything more. The brands that we carry that do framed and frameless, they charge exactly the same amount of money for both. So if the style that you're picking isn't compromised by the friend, and you're really looking for durability, you can go framed and you haven't hurt yourself, really, you know, even attaching everything to the ceiling. When it's a framed cabinet brand. All this stuff gets just a little bit easier. You know when you're doing a frameless cabinet to you of building a new house. So the good thing is, is your house is going to be very close to being perfect. In an older house where we live, you know, many many of the jobs we do are older homes, there's all kinds of bows, and all kinds of bellies and all kinds of out of square and how to plumb walls in the homes that we work in. So when people get frameless cabinets, there's no play with the cabinets because the wall of one cabinet goes right against another. So I mean if you think about it, imagine what happens if you have a bump in the wall. If you're putting frameless cabinets on the wall scrubbing each cabinet side to each cabinet side. Once you hit the bump, the cabinet start coming out past the bump, and then when the bump recedes, they have to keep on going in a straight line. So what happens is the cabinets get farther and farther and farther away from the wall. So you have a lot of these problems too. Whereas in framed cabinets, there's actually a half inch gap between the sides of the cabinets in between them so the cabinets can in some slight way. If the walls are bowed, the face of the cabinets can curve, a notice to the naked eye conform with the wall if the walls a little bit bold or a little bit bellied. You can shim things much more easily. There's a lot more play for frame cabinets. So that's just another advantage to them to. Oh, um,

Speaker 3  19:24  
you've moved, you've moved me to frame so thank you. There are

Paul McAlary  19:29  
some things like you get a little bit more storage space and framed but you have so much storage space in your kitchen that we first sort of figured out that the average frameless kitchen only really gets about 4% more storage space. That's really not as significant as you might think. You know, the rollouts and the stuff are just getting a tiny bit narrower because they all have to pass through the frame of the cabinet. Okay, so let's go on to just look at your design, which is pretty good. You're leaving appropriate space Since everywhere, I mean, you get five gold stars for that you have a big house, though, so that helps your cause. But so many times people are crowding things and making things really tight. You even have to lay, I'm not sure if you pick this up on the podcast, but 99% of the time, when we see people that are going to the ceiling with cabinets, they won't ever leave any kind of a block for play, it looks like you've got a you know, just like some kind of riser from the top of your pantry cabinets that's reaching the ceiling, instead of just leaving them open over the top of the pantries, you're closing it in. But you're at least giving yourself a little bit of play. So you're not pushing the doors of your cabinets up against the ceiling where they're going to rub and hit recessed lights and stuff like that. So it seems like you're sort of thought a lot of that stuff through to

Speaker 3  20:51  
the I'm gonna put bulkheads in there. Okay, so I've seen a lot of the things that you're telling me I've seen in other homes, you know, friends of mine that are built homes and places that I've lived. And I understand what you're saying one of my pet peeves is when when people are put cabinets in there. And like you said, there's let's say an open, I'm making this up. Now, let's say there's a foot of open space before you hit the ceiling. I don't even want I mean, you know, dirt gets in there, stuff gets in there. I don't want to even clean the place.

Paul McAlary  21:33  
No, well, foot isn't that bad. Only because you can at least clean on top. If you hire somebody you're getting to an age when you don't want to be climbing on ladders to clean the top of your cabinets. Nor should really anybody be doing it. It's just a recipe for disaster. So if we just close it in, and the worst thing that you could do is only leave yourself a little bit of space on the top of the cabinet, then you can't even get up there to clean. If you got framed cabinets. There'll be a little bit of a recess up there. You'll be collecting dust and dust dust mites till the end of time. So you're always it's always good to close things in.

Speaker 3  22:08  
Yeah. And also the bulkhead acts as a chase if you're going to do wiring or, you know,

Paul McAlary  22:13  
inventing different in other things. Yeah, exactly. So all good. So then why don't we take your main run, which is your sink area with your two dishwashers and your foot area first, and just talk about it design wise. Okay, I'll say, again, I'll give you gold stars, because everything's pretty well thought out. Some things they'll people will be able to do. But I would advise you maybe not to do so in your picture, you've got like a base cabinets with five drawers. I think that most companies just naturally will make a four drawer base, but not a five drawer base. And I would think a four drawer base might be better for you. In that you'll get three thin drawers just like you have. And then one slightly deeper drawer below that could be a bread box. That could be a junk drawer, that could be something else. But the five drawer base. Each one of these drawers suddenly gets that much more narrow, particularly in the framed cabinets. So if you do switch the frame, these drawers and everything has to pass through the frames. And so everything gets a little bit smaller. So certainly if you go framed cabinets, I wouldn't do a five drawer base, I would do a four drawer base and frameless you could do a file

Speaker 3  23:31  
on base. I'm going to give you some feedback. My father's father was a dentist when I was a boy and I would go watch him talk about the old days. And I'd be watching him and I noticed that when he would be like a mechanic with the tool chest, I noticed that he had all kinds of shallow drawers. And I noticed that when I was living in homes that my parents felt we had normal standard, whatever the builder did, and I noticed that as you know, we had four kids in the family and mom and dad's we had six people. And one of the things that we would have is that, you know people would be filling up the drawers or junk drawers. It doesn't even matter what you put in that families are going to fill up the drawers, and I hated digging around looking for stuff. I just hated it. So you wonder

Paul McAlary  24:27  
if you do a four drawer base instead of a five, you'll still have three thin drawers and only one slightly deeper drawer. It's not going to be really deep. There'll be slightly deeper. And if you don't have to do that, but if you do do five, your drawers will be unusually thin. If you do do frame cabinets, because there's a piece of ale that's going to be an inch and a half wide that's going to go in between each individual drawer. So that rail will help support your drawers though. It keeps everything from falling apart a little bit But let me just keep on going a little bit. So all I see is totally fine. The five drawers or the four drawers. If you end up doing frameless, I think the five drawers are fine. If you do the frame, then you're going to lose some space in each drawer and you might stick to four, you could even do four equally sized drawers. So I know in our drawers in our house is a standard depth drawer. And we have like tin foil and things like that in the top of one of the drawers, the drawers and so deep that if the tin foil is in the packages and closed 100% of the way close, then you can't close the drawer. The drawers are only like four inches deep on a standard drawer, four and a quarter. So it's not that deep. But just to keep on going down your sink base, which is four feet wide, would have in your picture to 24 inch drawers, I mean doors on your sink base. So just to warn you about that in a frameless cabinet. In a frame cabinet even I've never in my life ordered a cabinet with a 24 inch door on it, because it's always going to fail over time. Again, the door is 24 inches deep. When the doors are open, they're cantilever and out that much more stress goes on the hinge the doors will sag over time. And if you have frameless cabinets, the doors end up ripping out of the sides of the cabinet. If you have 24 inch cabinets, if you do do a 48 inch sink base, you probably need to make it three doors instead of two doors, you know, the cabinet company can help you with that, probably what you would do is essentially combined cabinets, you'd have some kind of wooden style that one door will be attached to so you wouldn't open the whole thing and have it completely open underneath. If you did do that and you did 24 inch doors, then you're just going to have a problem over time. I mean, one of the designers that works for me, she won't even order a door 21 for two reasons. One, because it looks terrible. But also because she knows that the 21 stores tend to sag a little bit more than the other doors. I ordered a 21 inch cabinet, you know when it makes sense. But 24 is a no no.

Richard  27:17  
Okay, thank you. And then it looks better the way you've got it. But I would always because it's symmetrical. But if it was me, I would just change your waist width and recycling center if you switched it so that it was asymmetrical. And put, you know, one dishwasher on the other side of the recycling life would be a little bit easier when you're at your sink. Because when you're at your sink, you'll have an if you're trying to like maybe scrape a dish off into a garbage can and then put it into the dishwasher, you don't have a recycling thing next to you. So you're going to have the dishwasher in between you and any recycling center on both sides. So I would just prefer to have at least one of these pullouts right next to me when I was at the sink. And then you know have that second dishwasher, which will probably be the secondary dishwasher that I use just on the other side of the pullout, you won't be completely symmetrical, but it will make life a little bit easier.

Speaker 3  28:25  
But that's what that was a good. Let me ask you something. And I like what you just said to put the where the dishwashers now, if I just switched and put the Reese waste recycling center, closest to the sink on both sides, because what I'm hearing is when you're doing your food prep, and you're scraping off waste, you want to be close proximity to the pullout for the waste recycling, and you use the use the dishwasher less frequently.

Paul McAlary  28:58  
Yeah, but it's also good to have the dishwasher next to you too. Now we're a little bit in the weeds just in that it's not going to be a crisis for you either way, the 24 inch door is much more important than this dishwasher pullout issue. But I think having a dishwasher on one side of you so that you can have the door to the dishwasher down and actually be loading one of the dishwashers at least while the trash can is pulled out on the other side of you when you're at your sink base. That's the most convenient thing of all, we're always trying to give people that you might even want to put one of the other pullouts in the island if you want it to so that if you're working at the island, you have a trash can and recycling or whatever in the island. Maybe that's what you do is you put you could even put a dishwasher in your island if you want or put one trash can on one side, dishwasher on the other and then the other dishwasher on the same side and just another trash can across in the island. It's convenient to have one of each on each side. gets away from the symmetry. But just consider it, it's up to you that kind of stuff is, when you're working with the kitchen designer, they'll probably bring it up to you. And you can just think about it when you're in your house now, it would, how convenient would it be to have a dishwasher right next to me on one side, but then have a trash can also next to me on the other?

Speaker 3  30:19  
I think these are very, very good input. But by the way, has anyone do you know of anyone, whether it be your company or anybody that over time that you've taken photographs of before and afters, and an annotated them to take the knowledge and the experience that you have? And have it become a sales document, but also a teaching document? When you're training here on people? I mean, you can you've done so many, you know, so much work with people, you could walk in and photograph the way it is now. And then based on these good recommendations, you're making the photograph afterward, but then put it in a format where you can annotate it so that when people are going online looking for your blogs, by the way, I did listen to blog 28 That you were thank you for that, by the way, but you've got Okay, well, I was saying you've got so much information, I've read over 100 of your blog. They're fantastic. That's why I'm calling it. But what I'm saying is his also is anyone you got the national Kitchen and Bath Association, you got all the National Association of Homebuilders. Has anyone taken the very valuable experience of people like yourselves? And like when we're talking about drawers? I have? No you just said something if the drawer is not deep enough, then you know the maybe the aluminum foil won't pull out of the bag or you can't get a Ziploc bag out of the box. If anyone actually ever looked at all that and and made him saying the average depth of a this is this thing. And that's why these drawers are this way. And there's anyone?

Paul McAlary  32:08  
So the answer is a little bit. In fact, it's almost the opposite. I think that it's not that the people that build cabinets have done it that much. If you look at for a blog, there's a blog we have of a own shop teacher that builds his own cabinets. If you really wanted to get into the weeds, this shop teacher has combined the frame and a frameless cabinet to really make the perfect cabinet. And his shop class makes this cabinet and we have a video of him on our blog, showing how he invented this cabinet and how it works and everything else. But again, no cabinet company makes that he makes that his students and he make that particular cabinet and he's figured it all out and everything else to answer your question is nobody in the industry really gets as in depth as he might have done personally. But he's an exception to the rule. And I'm a huge fan of his that he's really combined these things over a lifetime of making cabinets and everything else. But know that the industry doesn't really do this, however, the food companies do, right. So that's why 18 inch wall cabinets don't help you as much as you think. Because food products and everything else are all made to work in a 12 inch deep cabinet. So spaghetti boxes and cereal boxes and everything else, if you have an 18 inch deep wall cabinet, and you're gonna put all this stuff on the wall cabinet or plates and everything else, that extra six inches that you're getting isn't helping you that much. Because all of your plates and cups and all those things are sort of just designed to fit perfectly in the standard size cabinets. So if you put spaghetti in the wall cabinet, then you know what do you do you hide spaghetti and back of other boxes, you know, once you put a box, the regular depth, it's going to come at 11 inches or whatever. And then you know that sort of makes the most sense. Or once you put pasta sauce in a wall cabinet you can fit. I'm not sure I think it's three. But you know, they're making the sizes of the containers, components that work with a 12 inch deep wall cabinet and 24 inch base cabinets, so pots and pans. And so the other industries that work around our industry, they do way more research, and they make things to work in the sizes that the cabinet companies do them and the Cabinet companies, they almost never change and you can't teach them anything. So just as an example. There hasn't been formica countertops popular in this country by and large for 20 years and the standard height of a bass cabinet and the standard height of a wall cabinet and and everything that's associated with it is all derived from the thickness of a countertop being an inch and a half. And that because that was the thickness of a countertop 20 years ago and before when they were all laminates and Formica. But all the new tops are either one and a quarter inch thick or three centimeters or possibly thinner, but three centimeters is the most common thickness. And the industry hasn't adjusted after 20 years. So

Speaker 3  35:26  
first of all, I complete from a, from a business standpoint, I understand everything you're saying. absolutely understand. However, when you pointed out that I want to do things differently, because you know, this is my forever home. And and you're right I do. The good news is I do have a friend that is a professional woodworker guy that builds furniture for restaurants and bars. And he's the one that built this thing for my printer. So I could, and he has built kitchen cabinets and done all that. And so how can I get? How can I reference that I have the home,

Paul McAlary  36:08  
I would try to compromise a little bit. Because when you have a big cabinet company, I've said this and people have gotten mad at me. You know, we're a cabinet dealer. So I'm sort of prejudiced that we carry all these cabinet brands. But there are no cabinet dealers that hire individual carpenters to make cabinets for them. And really, there's a lot of different reasons. But part of it is that even if you're making custom cabinets, you have a system, you're mass producing and making cabinets in a larger volume. You have vacuums, you have ovens to bake things, you have all kinds of technology at your disposal that a smaller company wouldn't have. And the other thing is, is since you're a bigger entity, it doesn't matter if one of your employees were to drop dead, right. But if you're hiring an individual carpenter to build cabinets for you, you know what if he drops dead in the middle of your project, what if you don't have a warranty, really, I mean, the guy could say I'll come back any time but he could retire tomorrow. And then you have no warranty on your cabinets. If something fails, he's much more likely to do something, or to use finishes or varnishes or whatever, that haven't been tested. And he's experimenting. And we've had cabinet companies experiment and change the formula for the paints that they might use. And then all of a sudden the paints fail. And we've had to replace every door and drawer fronts on an entire kitchen. But the manufacturer did it free of charge well because it's a bigger company, and they have insurance too. And all of us are working together and you have a better system. Some of this. If you have a couple of individual things that you want to do or individual cabinets I would say use your friend, but don't buy all your cabinets or have your friend or any other individual person. Don't have them make your kitchen for you. That wouldn't be a good thing. Okay, on special issues, it might be a good experiment, because if it fails, it's only one cabinet or one area or one printer pull out you could have the cabinet company make the thing and you know same thing with the cabinet company. You can experiment have them make cabinets 30 inches deep, but I don't think I do it for my whole kitchen. It's going to start to get astronomically expensive and you won't really pay be paying for much that will get you as much as you think or because of the same thing that I was saying is when the rest of the world operates with the certain depths or whatever when you make things in unusual depth or unusual size. At least for the interiors of the cabinets you're not going to be capturing that much. I fully agree with you about the countertops. If the countertops get a little bit deeper, that helps with all these things that are on the back of the countertops and making the wall cabinets a little bit deeper, maybe 15 inches deeper, is a good compromise. So you could make your base cabinets 30 inches deep make your wall cabinets 15 You'll have a little bit farther to reach or any kind of compromise of this. You can pull your base cabinets forward as much as you want

Speaker 3  39:13  
in your brain. First of all, I want to thank you again for your sharing your expertise. Let me let me ask you a couple things. If I have 30 inch deep countertops which I want and I am currently undecided about that I understand that I can move a 24 inch deep lower cabinet forward I understand that but what about the uppers and you've brought up some very good points number one the framed versus the frameless especially on the uppers trying to go from 12 inch standard to 18 inches. What about you have a 30 inch deep countertop if you have 12 inch uppers you've got to reach back to the that's the front yeah to reach back 18 inches right right

Paul McAlary  40:00  
So that's why maybe you make if you're going to do 30 inch, then you definitely I wouldn't do 18 inch wall cabinets, I would do fifteens. And then fifteens, you're probably if you're doing frame cabinets, then frame cabinet companies will make 15. And they won't blink, once you get past 15 does start to freak out. But if you did fifteens, and you did 24 inches bases and you pull them six inches forward, you'd only be reaching three extra inches than other people. So I don't think that would be that that's a good compromise. Or when you're using 24 inch bass cabinets, you don't have to make it 30 You can make it 28 You can make it 28 and a half, and now you're only reaching one and a half inches farther than other people.

Speaker 3  40:47  
Okay, let me give you another thing that I want to get your thought on. Let's say I still want the 30 inch deep countertop. And now I'm going to go to a 15 inch deep overhead cabinet. Do you know he Evany? And I'm going to do framed because of all the reasons you said because that gives the strength that I need. Now, do you know anybody that has uppers? I've seen all kinds of new abunda the international Home Show builder Show in Las Vegas this last January and I saw all kinds of new hardware that you know you're you're pulling it down. There are different ways of getting access. But as in Have you seen anyone that let's say I do a 30 inch deep countertop and then I do upper that's 15 inches deep do you have you ever seen anyone use full extension slides on a upper on an upper so that, you know when you reach back there and you grab it and use it out?

Paul McAlary  41:49  
It won't help you really very much when something pulls out of an upper First off, if something falls off the pullout that you have, it's going to break. It's falling from a height. So like if you want to rollouts in the pantry, we won't give anybody rollouts above the wall cabinet height, it's just asking for something to pull out that could be in your face that could have something fall off of it, that could be dangerous. And even when you have pull outs, most pull outs only work when you get to 18 inches anyway, they're made for base cabinets. But once you get to anything below 18, they won't be soft, close, and you lose space with a pullout. So once you have a pullout, you lose like three inches in the back. So what's the point of making the cabinet deeper to add pull outs when the internal space is still actually less than it would have been? Because the pullout, it has to pass through the frame of the cabinet and the pullout doesn't reach the back of the cabinet because that's how the tracks and that's how everything works. You know, when you're reinventing the wheel, it's stuff that you haven't considered but no one's making the things and the things that you're really doing. A lot of the times just don't really make that much sense. Because there's stuff that you haven't thought through that if this thing is pulling out and it's up in the air, once it's more than the bottom shelf wins, it's a little bit over your head. Now you can't even see when you pull this thing out, right, it's above your eye level, you pull this thing out, you don't even know what you're reaching up to grab anymore. Whereas if it's in fact and nothing's pulling out, you can see what's there. A lot of these things if you built them, I'm just throwing out there the problems I can think of off the top of my head, but there'll be tons of problems that I haven't even won't be able to think of that will occur when you reinvent when you do too much of reinventing of the wheel.

Speaker 3  43:46  
Oh first of all, again, I this very helpful your your observations and comments and your experience is very helpful. I've thought through a bunch of s not nearly what you know, but I've already thought like if if it was a bottom, let's say you got a 36 inch high kitchen counter and then I've got 18 inches but before you hit the bottom of the overhead and then and and then I've got let's say a 15 inch deep overhead and I'm thinking okay, well it's a matter of reaching back there and I was thinking if if I did want to experiment with a pull out and I understand what you said usually they're, they're not soft clothes. I mean they do 18 inch, usually on those things, but if you did then I've seen designs in a pantry that I haven't seen. For example in an overhead cabinet and the pantry puts a little it's more of a tray then it's not a flat shelf. It's a tray with little you know two inch, two inch high sides or three inch high sides, that kind of thing. But that's when

Paul McAlary  44:53  
you do a pantry pull out with a pull up those floor to ceiling in the pantry. So that the whole the whole pulls out. And you're looking at the thing that's pulling out from that you only really do that with like, at most, usually 15 inch wide pantries, maybe they do it in 18, I'm not sure. But then you're pulling this out so that you can examine the pull out from the sides. I mean, they make spice poles that pull outs for wall cabinets that are only 12 inches deep, and then you pull them out, my brother has one he thinks it's good, I think it's silly. If he wants to look at his spices, he's got to get his head cocked around the side of the cabinet. Whereas if he put his spices in a different location are used another mechanism, you wouldn't be trying to figure out what you got from the sides. But yeah, I mean, they do it in a pantry pull out, but it won't be a wide cabinet that pulls out, when that whole thing comes out that you're going to look at it from the side, the only way you can see this thing that you're pulling out is from the side, which is the case, then if you had three cans going across, you'd only see the one on the left side and the one on the right side, you wouldn't see the can in the middle, you wouldn't know what it was right? You're spending all this money, there's so many things you can spend it on to spend it on these kinds of things, compromise a little bit and try to paint a little bit more between the lines. But why don't we move on just so we can finish it because I have another person soon. Okay, looking at your the most important run that you have the cooktop area that you have the two columns that you have on either side of the cooktop, I mean any of the side that you're on either side of your cooktop. The more contemporary you want your kitchen to be, the less InStyle. That is. And so if it was me, I would wouldn't have those columns coming all the way down to the countertop. Because first off, it doesn't go with the style that you're sort of going for. But more importantly, now the countertop isn't very useful on either side of your cooktop, how big is your cooktop going to be

Speaker 3  47:00  
3030 36. And there's going to be like 14 inches of counter on each side of it before you hit those towers,

Paul McAlary  47:08  
you won't be able to really cut and chop in 14 inches of space very well. So you'll have to leave your cooktop to go over to the other side of the columns to really be able to work on the side of your cooktop. That look, we call it hearth sir grottoes that people did around cooktops, it's really falling out of fashion. Now, it was popular when kitchens were more ornate. But it never was function. It always was problematic. But in your style that you're going for is less appropriate. So I would give that up. And then the other thing I would just say is when you're reconfiguring and rejiggering, sort of it will look nicer. If you can get symmetry like right now you have symmetry it looks like I think, but you want the doors on the wall cabinets on either side of your your actually did it a little bit backwards. But you want the doors on the wall cabinets on either side of your window to be the same size. And ideally, you want the doors on either side of your cooktop, wall cabinets to be the same size so that it's much more symmetrical looking. So you'd have to rearrange some things to do that. And then in a perfect world. Ideally, you don't really want your cooktop and your sink on that same wall. And the reason is just that you have this cleaning area, and you have this cooking area. And all the work that's going to be done in your kitchen is going to be in between these two areas. So you have all of this countertop all over the place in your kitchen. And you'll be working in this one stretch of countertop. So I always use the example of if I shade people's countertops according to how often they're getting used, were leaving them white is not used at all and shading them darker red is using them all the time. A well designed kitchen has all pink countertops, you're gonna have a bright red spot in between your sink and in between your countertop. And that's where 90% of your cooking preparation is going to go on that also brings to account is why would you ruin that by having a column there. But also, if we moved your refrigerators to a different location, they're in their location, that's not a good idea, sort of right now either. They're really too close to this working area, and they should be put forced out a little bit onto the perimeter. And it would be a better place to have your cooktop going down that wall there somewhere.

Speaker 3  49:47  
So let me ask you this. He was countertops. Okay, where the cooktop is the cooktop, those those columns on either side we're only going to become remember it's a 30 inch deep Eleanor. And then those columns are only going to come out 18 inches from the wall. So there's a 12 inch in front of the columns. And each column, I'm calling them spice towers in the intent, I understand what you're saying about the look of it. But that that also creates, if you line it with porcelain, or you line it with a tile or something, then that becomes a chimney effect. And, you know, get splattered, the splatters would be on the inside of those columns. And the columns would be you know, remember this, you're overthinking design,

Paul McAlary  50:38  
you're overthinking. Because you're overthinking these the advantages of these columns, try working on a 12 inch countertop, it's not good, right? I don't know that I love the idea of the spices in the columns. But if you do like the idea of the spices in the columns, they can pull out and then you could do this and not reach the countertop. These, this spice columns can only reach the bottom of the wall cabinets. So you can have the thing that you like with the pullouts and you can have them be the depth that you want to make the hood area, that hood area, that whole depth. You can have everything that you want. And it works better if they just don't reach the countertop, and then the splattering thing that you're creating or whatever on the sides. If the spice pullouts then where's the sides, right the sides are, I guess the thing when it pulls out then it's pulling out asked and you'll have this things are you I don't know that there's ever this splashing advantage to having something on the sides like that people think all these things and come up with reasons for the things that they do. I think you've over thought this one. So I don't know I'm blanking sideways. If it splashes on there, that's an area to have to clean, you're gonna have to clean the countertop anyway, you're creating crevices and all kinds of other stuff and the handles of your pots and the pans when they turn out. Right because you got five foot four inches. So what does that leave you 14 inches. So the countertop that's on either side of the stove, when the handles of your pots and pans turn out away from the flames, they're utilizing all the sides, the whole 14 inches just about that you've got there, you're just going to be doing everything on the other side of these columns and they'll just be in your way.

Speaker 3  52:20  
Well to your point the columns I would have only the vent hood would only would start at 30 inches above the cooktop. And so I would terminate the top of the spice the spice tower I would terminate that there this drawing and I didn't do this drawing I mean I was I was giving my information and preferences to a guy that was drawing this for me. So I haven't edited it yet to the kind of point that you're saying but in general the concept is a 30 inch deep counter and having basically walls of the cabinet the spice towers would be would have walls on them and then you pull out something like rubber shell pas and you have access to the spices from either side either if you're on the sink side or on the

Paul McAlary  53:14  
knees, there's no need for them to go down to the countertop though. And not only that, you need the hood that you've got you need that hood coming forward. You know normally you want a hood to come at least out 18 inches. If you make your countertop 30 inches deep, then you need that count then all those wall cabinets and those columns and everything else have to come out 24 Right because you need to have your hood over your burners so that the hood can capture the grease. Now we're talking about grease and smoke and everything else. The side thing not so much but you need it to be over the top of your burners. You need this thing so it's during smoke and grease. So that whole area yeah the

Speaker 3  53:56  
guy that I've met with some ventahood at the show he said that if you have a 36 inch cooktop for example, he recommends that you exceed decide you hang over three inches. On on

Paul McAlary  54:12  
talking about yes, I'm talking about the depths that the depths of your when you make your countertops 30 inches deep, you're going to pull your forward because your cooktop is going to have to go all the way to the front edge of the countertop. And then when you pull your cooktop to the front edge of the countertop, now you're going to need your hood to be six inches deeper than other people's hoods. Other people's hoods generally are 24 inches deep. We make them as shallow as 18. If you really have 30 inch countertops, you're just going to need to have a standard depth hood and have it be 24 So the hood will come out 24 And then and your columns for your spices and everything they can come out they have them come out 24 two, so that they're done that whole area is all encapsulated. But they don't need to come down to the countertop, they can stop at the bottom, they can stop either at the bottom of the wall cabinets next to them. Or if you want to get interesting, they could be like a six inch step up or three inch step up to give you a little bit of interest to make it a little bit more interesting.

Speaker 3  55:19  
Well, thanks, again, thank you for your, your experience. These these are things that most of us out here in the wild have, have no experience like you have. So this is very helpful to hear what you've got to say.

Paul McAlary  55:35  
So the other thing too is, your refrigerators are a little bit too inside of your triangle, baby, a better place for the refrigerators would be over where the cooktop is. So that the deep things would be in a corner, we're trying to always get deep tall things into a corner. So if you have like a pantry cabinet in that corner, and then add your refrigerators, after the pantry cabinet on the right side of your sink, that would be a better place for your pantry cabinet for your refrigerator and a pantry cabinet. And then to put your cooktop over on the wall where the refrigerators are, that will give you lots of countertop on either side of the cooktop. And you'll now have countertop on both sides of the stove and you won't be sharing a very small countertop between the two. And then that chase that you have that you sort of have to have. Because you're putting your refrigerators where you're putting them, there's no need. There's no reason,

Speaker 3  56:32  
right? No, I understand what you're saying. So when if

Paul McAlary  56:36  
your refrigerators get out of that corner where you have them, you'll be able to capture the countertop that's in the corner there. And then you'll also be able to have a lazy Susan, or any kind of corner, pull out that you just check that you if you'd like gadgets and stuff, there's lots of different gadgets you can have. Certainly the one that works best, I think is the one that's the most boring, which is a lazy Susan. But there's magic corners and LeMans and all kinds of corner units that you'll be able to take advantage of if your refrigerator moves down. But anyway, why don't we stop for today. And I think I've given you the only other thing I guess, a desk area nowadays, I mean, a lot of kitchens that we do nowadays, we don't have desk areas in them anymore. Because if you really have a laptop, or if you're working, what you'll do is you can keep stuff in your desk area, but then you'll take it all out, and then you'll go down on a much better place to work, which would be your island, your island will be a lot better place to work at and to do paperwork and to do everything else that especially your desk area has these bookcases. If you put a laptop on top of your counter, you have no very little counter to work at. Like right now I'm working at the counter in my kitchen, I'm spread out on a big peninsula, and I'm taking up a huge amount of space with my laptop on my microphone and everything else. You don't really have that luxury because you're bringing stuff out very deep stuff on either side of your desk area. And my question would be even if it's a good view, I don't know that I would still sit there I'd rather sit at my at your island, which is so nice if I was doing paperwork, so I might pull stuff out of that area. Okay, that's

Speaker 3  58:15  
also a pass through, that's a pass through area to the outside. So one of the to your point if you're sitting there first of all, you're right, it's a fantastic view of the park and and then to the bookcases on either side hold cookbooks. And so it's not meant to be you're, you're describing your situation almost like you know, mobile home office type thing. This this is not meant to be a long time when you're sitting there maybe to make grocery lists or something like that. It's not meant to spend days with clients like me but don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 2  58:56  
Well, I mean, we can looks like the desk area is in an opposite place from where it is on the two dimensional thing you sent me in trying to figure out look, I'm looking at the desk area, it looks like I see the chair coming out there. It's to the left of the refrigerator right.

Paul McAlary  59:19  
Your floor plan doesn't jive with your elevations.

Speaker 3  59:22  
Well, the floor plan doesn't show the desk drawn in it's an empty space there.

Paul McAlary  59:28  
Well the floor plan. It's on the wrong side of the floorplan right your desk is on the right side, you're trying you're gonna move your desk to the left side. So he put a desk whoever it was that did these designs or maybe when you did it or whoever did it, they put a desk and your bookcases on the right side of your floorplan. So when you really want the side of your floorplan

Speaker 3  59:50  
well there's beyond the west the floor see I'm not sure what the orientation

Paul McAlary  59:54  
should be on the west. This showing them on the right there showing them on the east. So there Showing them on the east side instead of the West. I see what the window that's what I was

Speaker 3  1:00:04  
but look down where it says before it says west elevation. So he's doing a cut through is he's doing a slice and you are looking at West that way. So when you see the yellow it says before,

Paul McAlary  1:00:19  
he's got that but he doesn't have it drawn in on the floor plan on the floor plan he's got that is empty your desk area. Currently he's got a desk area drawn in on the east side. So once you get rid of desk area on the east side, you put your ovens what are the two your two pantry things that you have the two other tool things that you've got there, one of them could become one of your tool pantry cabinets could become your oven. And just to finally one other thing I just wanted to mention the lower cabinets that you got on your two pantry areas, we have all that cabinetry, you got a really a lot of cabinets and a lot of narrow drawers. Ideally, the perfect size for cabinets depends on what you're using them for. But a lot of narrow things is not desirable. A one foot wide cabinet that's old drawers is almost senseless, because the inside of the drawers on a framed Cabinet will only be seven inches wide. So seven inches is just not a useful interior of a drawer size. That whole area, you want to combine cabinets there. Ideally 18 inches is a decent size for a narrow cabinet. And then for a wider cabinet. 30 inches is a good width. We never try to have a whole bunch of 12 inch deep cabinets 112 inch deep cabinet is a problem. More than one is a mistake.

Speaker 3  1:01:48  
Yeah, well, first of all good observation. But some when when I was talking about this in general, when I said I designed it, I was designing it sort of location wise, I did not make the decisions. These were decisions that were arbitrarily made by an architect that's just filling in space. So he's filling in I did not anyway, right? Yeah, and it's not. To your point, I'm absolutely paying attention to what you're saying. Because the I know that their practice, this is where I feel, I wish someone, some geeky guy or person where they went around and they said, Here's walk into our warehouse or our laboratory and we're gonna we're Better Homes and Gardens laboratory or consumer, I don't care who it is walk in there. And we're going to show you all the different ways that people build cabinets, we're going to show you frame, we're going to show you frameless, we're going to show you 36 Anti counters, we're going to sell you 36 or 30 inch deep counters, we're going to put shallow drawers, we're going to show with full extension without full extension. And then we're going to show you why we are recommending what we're recommending. And boy would that be you know if anybody just did that for like a laboratory where you had regional laboratories like that, where humans like me that don't know what they're doing when they're ready,

Paul McAlary  1:03:15  
no one's going to do the things that you want to do. So you're going to go to the laboratory and you're going to find out that every laboratory is going to universalize everything. And the stuff that you want to do that you thought of on your own is, it's going to be few and far between that you're going to find much of that stuff in the laboratory, because they're always going to be showing people stuff. We don't have a show when we have offices and we have a different business model really. But when you have a showroom, we shall we shall blind basis, we show things that aren't very popular. But it makes no sense to show things that just really aren't done in general. Even if you had that laboratory, you'd be trying to show people as many things as possible that are done at least on some kind of regular basis. So once it's beyond that regular basis, it wouldn't make sense to display it. But

Speaker 3  1:04:08  
you're you're bringing out something I would take it into an act, the only way it would work is to go into an academic environment instead of a practical environment. So because teaching

Speaker 2  1:04:20  
so that gives you a lot to think about and then you can you know, if you want to be generous, and you want to you can still keep the things that it's always whether you're a customer or not, or just a cool person. It's always the customer's decision. So whatever stuff you decide, I've lectured you on the things that I think I would change, we if you decide to keep those things or you decide to get frameless cabinets where you decide to keep the locations of things that's fine and we can just concentrate on other things, but you're certainly free to call in another time and as many times as you want. We have a woman older that calls in US causes in on a regular basis.

Speaker 3  1:04:56  
Thank you How do I find the home shop teacher you're talking about?

Paul McAlary  1:04:59  
You go to our website, maybe and you type in in the search bar, you type in shop teacher, maybe, or you could type in cabinet construction, and you should find that blog.

Richard  1:05:16  
Okay, if I can't find it,

Paul McAlary  1:05:17  
no one will find it to me via email to you on later today.

Speaker 3  1:05:22  
Thank you. Okay, Paul, thank you. You're, you're I can, you're very valuable, very valuable to the marketplace. Thank you.

Paul McAlary  1:05:30  
Well, you're welcome. And you took all my suggestions well, and you don't have to take them. I mean, it's, it's your kitchen. It's not my kitchen. It's better for me to give you an unvarnished version of what I think and make you think about it long and hard. And then if it's that important to you, you won't give up, you'll still do it. But any compromises you make, we know in general will be compromises that in the long run, you'll probably be happier with. But the stuff that you don't compromise on will be important enough to you that you want to keep it and you're not going to sacrifice it. So it's about compromising. That's, you know,

Speaker 3  1:06:06  
everybody I learned from you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Paul McAlary  1:06:10  
Okay, good talking to you.

Richard  1:06:13  
All right. All right. Take care.

Mark Mitten  1:06:14  
Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul maxillary. This podcast is brought to you by Brighton cabinetry, high quality, custom cabinetry at competitive prices. For more on kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, go to www dot mainline kitchen design.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai