Cabinets for Alamo Heights houses

Small kitchens in old houses

Most of Alamo Heights went up between the twenties and the fifties, and those kitchens were drawn for one cook and one stove. They are small, they usually have a doorway on three of the four walls, and the original cabinets were built on site by a carpenter with a hand plane. Getting real storage out of a room like that is a drawing problem before it is ever a wood problem.

So the first visit here is mostly measuring doorways and ceiling heights. Plenty of these houses have nine or ten foot ceilings with a foot of wasted air above the uppers. Taking the cabinets all the way up with a stacked second row is usually the cheapest storage in the house, and it makes a small kitchen read taller instead of tighter.

Plaster, lath and nothing square

Plaster over wood lath gives you nothing flat to hang a cabinet on, and a century of settling means the corners have opened up. Face frames get scribed to the wall here, and the filler at the end of a run gets cut in the room with the cabinet held in place. It takes longer and it is the only way the finished job looks like it belongs.

The old butler pass through is the other thing we deal with constantly. A lot of these houses still have one, and people either want it opened up or rebuilt with drawers behind the original door. Both are fine. Both need the casing matched, so we copy the profile on a shaper and run new stock that dies into the trim already on the wall.