Mark Mitten 0:02 Did you use an online tool to design your kitchen? Did you bring your design to a kitchen designer who is more than willing to sell you your extra large, custom, expensive, 54 inch cabinets when there is a much cheaper and better alternative? You better call Paul Paul McAlary 0:32 Hi, Tim, can you hear me? Yes, Paul, I can hear you. Wonderful. I'm looking at you're absorbing your design now, and I guess just looking at it quickly, my first question is, how high are your ceilings? Do you know? Yeah, Tim 0:48 so on that on the first page, it's 10 foot over the island, but then it'll be nine foot over the cabinetry. Paul McAlary 0:57 So it's 10 foot over the island you have sort of, what, like a tray ceiling going around the room. And, yeah, okay, so then, yeah, Tim 1:07 then we'll, we'll take the planners to take the cabinets all the way to that nine foot. So Paul McAlary 1:11 if you're taking the cabinets all the way to the nine foot, I would tell you that this doesn't really look very good the way you're doing it. Okay, what I would do is, and even if you put like, a three inch molding, made the cabinets three inches smaller, you know, you see how every one of the cabinets and the pictures that you got the wall cabinets has that bar in the middle of the cabinet door. Uh huh, the reason you have that is cabinet companies won't, if they don't have the bar there, they won't warranty the door, because the door is going to warp and shrink and have all kinds of problems. So you're getting an unusual height cabinet here. You're getting 48 inch high wall cabinets, and it just 48 inch high wall cabinets. I'll send you a I have your email, so I'll send you like a blog where we sort of discuss 48 inch high wall cabinets. It's just the height that doesn't look good. And it always looks good that buildings on top of your cabinets, so you'll save nobody makes 42 inch high cap 48 inch high cabinets, unless they're custom. So that's why you see architects and people that don't know anything about cabinets designing with 48 inch high wall cabinets all the time, but it's forcing you into a very expensive cabinet brand and very expensive tall cabinets, usually okay. If you were going to go nine feet, I would recommend either stacking cabinets and having like, a 36 inch cabinet with a I mean, and this doesn't, this has you, I guess, maybe even going higher than that. I don't know if you're if there's no mold, there's no molding on top of this, I sure you're coming down. You're not coming down nine I think Tim 2:51 they're 54 inch cabinet. So Paul McAlary 2:53 54 inch, so 54 inch cabinets are even crazier. So, so, yeah, okay, it's gonna go down to nine feet, I would probably do 36 inch cabinets and a 12 inch cabinet on top, with little cabinets above and then six inches of molding. Or if you really want to get fancy, 36 inch cabinets and 15 inch cabinets above and a three inch molding. But not having any molding is very out of fashion, even if you wanted very contemporary cabinets, it will look better with just a flat piece of molding, you know, just a flat riser on the front of the cabinets. It's like having, let's go all the way up to the soffits. Is something that sort of died out in the 70s, and that's a long time ago. Tim 3:38 Yeah? So, okay, yeah, no, that's that completely makes sense. Yes, Paul McAlary 3:42 it will save you money if you go smaller with the cabinets, because you won't have to be in a custom cabinet brand. Like, what cabinet brand did you design this in? Have you gotten that for yet? Tim 3:53 So I did some initial work with a free tool online using soft cabinets. Oh, okay. And I handed it to the designer, and they came back with one brand, I think, Wolf, which was a little bit different than this. And they said, Oh, well, here's Shiloh, and here's this. Here we can do all sorts of good things with Shiloh. So, yeah, Paul McAlary 4:21 48 inch cabinets with Shiloh, although I don't really like, I'm not a fan of how Shiloh constructs their cabinets, but yeah, I mean, if you struck your cabinets down to 30 sixes and twelves or fifteens with a three inch molding on top, it will look a lot better. Okay, looking at what else you got here. So I guess in the drawing, when you're staring at your stove, you have more pantries on the left hand side in this picture, but in the floor plan that you sent me, it looks like that was supposed to be wall cabinets and and base cabinets over there. Oh, Tim 4:54 yeah, I my my wife vetoed her cabinet Correct. A counter space over there. He doesn't want more stuff to just accumulate gunk, so, so he just said, Hey, let cabinet. Paul McAlary 5:07 If you were going to add more tall cabinets, you know that area there that you have with the tall cabinets, it you pretty much have a landing field to the left of your stove, the way you have this design now, right, right. I don't know why you're keeping your stove there, but if it was me and I wanted those same amount of tall cabinets, I would put them in the corner of the room at the top, and then make that a breakfast bar over there, and keep it wall cabinets and base cabinets, or make it a wine bar, or make it into another, you know, just a microwave area, or anything that you wanted having 15 feet of all countertop before you get to the stove is just really wild. I mean, that's just just way more than countertop than you would ever need. So better to have another area where you can move people over to and then have the wall cabinets and the base cabinets over backwards on the other side, just because it gives you another area where people could be working or doing things, and more out in the open. People could have it could that could be where you put your coffee pot, or that could be where you had a wine refrigerator or anything else. But it's a separate area you're sort of trying to move these things around. And then even the the oven cabinet, the person that designed this, for example. I mean, I don't know if this was you doing it, but the design itself breaks lots of fundamental design rules. So you don't really okay your you don't want your your oven cabinet over there. When you take something out of the oven cabinet, the place where it's probably going to go is over on your stove top. So you don't want to be walking through the room in between the refrigerator and the stove. So generally, the better place for the oven would be all the way in the corner on the right hand corner. And then make that a pantry too, next to the refrigerator, to make the refrigerator built in, and then you want to have a panel on the side of the refrigerator to close it in. I'm sure. Do they have that I can't really Tim 7:07 see? And think so, yeah, that third picture, Paul McAlary 7:12 yeah. So keep that, change your oven cabinet to to a pantry, and then put a pantry over in the corner, and move your stove down the same distance so that it's closer to your sink. A lot of times when you're cooking, you're going to go directly from the stove to the sink. So having them offset by so much, they don't have to be directly in back of one another, but having them offset that much isn't helping you. So if you just move that one oven cabinet into the corner and then move the stove down 30 inches. That's still going to have it offset, and you're still going to end up having five feet or four feet of pantry space in the other corner. And then you'll have another pantry next to the refrigerator, which will make the refrigerator look built in. And then you'll have the open countertop that's the bar area to the right. And when you do those things, when you put it in three dimensions, you'll like it way better, because it's going to frame the stove, right? So you'll have tall cabinets, the oven cabinet on one side, the tall cabinets on the other side of that back wall, and you won't have the USF intrepid aircraft carrier or whatever of counter going down the whole wall. Got them. And then the other thing I would say is, when you do have this really big expanses, it also looks much nicer to have the hood be wider than this cooktop that's underneath it, okay? And I say that 99% of all kitchen designers don't know any better, so they will always make the hood the same size as the cooktop. But if you have somebody do that for you, and then you have them make there are no customers that ever don't choose bigger hoods. Okay, it just looks so much more proportional when you have the hood wider than the cooktop that's underneath it. Tim 8:57 Okay, so that's supposed to be a 36 inch induction top. So either 4648 Paul McAlary 9:04 Yeah, then go 42 or 48 you're probably going to have a hard time finding a 42 but if you get a 48 Yeah, it will work way better, and it will probably look more proportional. And then, if you didn't want to eat up that much wall cabinet space, you could go back to a 36 and have it be 36 and 36 but you probably at least want to see the bigger one, because it will look better. Tim 9:27 Okay. Well, I'm not laughing for a wall today or you Paul McAlary 9:31 have a lot of space and then yeah, I guess the other thing too about this design is you have, you know, lots of big pots and pans drawers going down the whole run around your stove, which is good. I don't know that you need that many when you're going to lose some of them when we remove the tall cabinets into the corners of the room on the left and right. But you also don't want narrow draw cabinets either. So it looks like there are 12. On the left side of your dishwasher and a 12 inch cabinet, you're not going to put cutlery in that. It's not wide enough to put cutlery, but you're probably planning on thinking that's what it's going to be used for. The inside of those drawers are only if the cabinet's 12 you minus five, so then the inside of the drawers are seven inches. So that's way too narrow to have knives, forks and spoons. So usually a fifth cabinet would be the absolute minimum that you would do that you just really need to reconfigure somehow, whether that's making that one bigger. You have this big garbage can pull out that's next to your sink right now, right? It's, I guess it looks like it's 21 so it's 254 trash cans. So yep, Tim 10:50 which is what I have today, and we use and I like Paul McAlary 10:53 it. So then I maybe what I would just do is I put a panel on the side of my dishwasher and get rid of the nine inch cabinet that you have over on the right side of the dishwasher. Or, I don't know that the cabinet that's you have your sink in. I don't know if you've picked a sink yet, but it looks like that. Cabinets 36 inches wide, yep, in the picture, it's a double bowl sink from the floor plan. But almost nobody gets a bowl and a half sink anymore. Tim 11:19 Oh, no, no, yeah, yeah, the overhead, that was just a, like, a stock picture, yeah, no, we kind of doing a single, like the biggest, you know, single basin we can get. Paul McAlary 11:31 You could, you might be totally happy with a 33 inch single bowl, basin, you know, the bowl can be 31 inches wide, and then, you know, the lips of the ball extend three quarters inches out, but it will fit in a 33 inch cabinet. And the 31 inch sink is gigantic, so if that's big enough for you, you can just get to the 15 inch cabinet to the left of the the garbage can. Then 15 inches is doable for nice forks and spoons, and that sort of solves your problem. And your sink just got this chink. Cabinets just got three inches smaller, and that doesn't hurt, okay? And then, right, yeah. I mean, other than that, the one thing I'd say is, when I'm looking at your cabinets and your cooktop cabinet, usually the bottom cabinets you have, like, old drawers, then this cooktop cabinet, then this cabinet next to it. That's a full height cabinet that goes all the way up. Yeah, but it look will look a lot better. First off, when you open the full height cabinet underneath the cooktop, that's going to expose the bottom of the cooktop and the face of the cooktop to you and expose things that you don't want to be seeing. So I would certainly make the bottom of the cooktop have a drawer front on it, and then I would have the cabinet to the left of the cooktop also have a drawer front on it, make that the pots and pans cabinet. And then if you wanted a full height cabinet, move that down so that you have more symmetry on either side. Tim 13:03 Okay, yeah, I realized it was a little bit asymmetric. Paul McAlary 13:06 Gets a little asymmetric. And, you know, we don't really care. But the thing we don't care about is having the bottom cabinets and the top cabinets align. That doesn't matter at all. And we don't really care, if you're a kitchen designer, about having the sink and the stove align across from each other. That doesn't freak me out, although it does freak customers out sometimes, because customers sometimes get a little more concerned about symmetry than we are, but the symmetry we're mostly about is having the door sizes be the same on each side of the stove, having there be a drawer based top drawer front, at least on each side of the stove, not to have a completely different cabinet, cabinet on one side of the stove on the bottom and another on on the other side, and especially the top cabinets, you'd sort of want the doors and the top of the cabinets to ideally be the same size on either side of The stove. And in the perfect world, we can arrange it. We like the doors to the top cabinets when you're standing at the stove, not to be double door cabinets the way you have now. So that, I'd have, they have to Tim 14:13 opening away from you, yeah, because Paul McAlary 14:14 they're opening in your way. So if you were to break it up so that, you know, let's say you have these cabinets are all 30 inches wide, or 36 inches wide. It's better to break them up into an 1836, 18, and then have the cabinet to the right of the stove be a door that hinges on the right, so when you open it up, you can reach up and grab your spices, or grab cooking oil, or grab whatever it is that you want when you're at the cooktop. And then on the left, same thing, if it's 230 sixes, or you go 18, then 36 then 18, so that the cabinet on the left of the cooktop, you're going to open, open that way, and then you can be reaching up and getting the things that you're utilizing when you're cooking. They're easily accessible. But I mean, again, that's an okay world, and something has to. No matter what way we design your kitchen, there's something wrong with it, right? You're You're always sacrificing one thing to get another. But that's though, all those things that I would just discuss with you, whether sort of the the priorities that we're trying to do whenever we can, and certainly the most important thing is it will look so much better and save you so much money if you don't go all the way up with a 54 inch cabinet. Because 54 inches just Yeah, It's wild. It's wild looking. You haven't seen a 54 inch cabinet in your life, probably because I don't know that I've seen one. I've seen them in pictures, but I don't know that I've run Tim 15:42 across them in real life. Yeah. I think I've got some custom ones in my current house that are really tall. And I agree that the the wood warps too easily, and Paul McAlary 15:53 it looks weird too. It just like, just, you know, so huge, yeah, so they just look at place when you sort of get it. And that's the other thing too, those really big doors, and it's such a big kitchen, when the hood gets bigger, not only does the hood get bigger, it looks nicer under the cooktop, but then also you're exposing more of the backsplash, so that more backsplash tile is exposed. Or actually in this kitchen, if you are putting the tall pantry or the tall oven cabinet on the right side in the corner, and the other tall pantry cabinets on the left side in the corner. Suddenly you have the thing that looks really good that people always are trying to do, but for one reason or another, looks terrible, and that's run their countertop up, their backsplash. People are always trying to take their expensive quartz countertops and then run that same color up their backsplash. And unfortunately, people usually have windows on the wall or a doorway or something, and at some point, either the trim on the Windows is buried under the thickness of the countertop or they have an L shape. And so because they have an L shape countertop, you get a corner where there's this countertop seam on the bottom, there's the backsplash running in the other direction, the backsplash running in the other direction. And then, because there's a seam on the bottom, you have four different directions, all meeting very close to each other in your kitchen. If you did decide that we're on your countertop, up your backsplash, it wouldn't even be that many square feet, because we put all those big cabinets right on the left side and the right side of the cooktop, and so it wouldn't be hyper expensive, and it also you wouldn't have any seams other than the one between your countertop and your backsplash. Or if you don't do that, you know, the tile will look better when you have a big hood and the tile is just more exposed. Okay, that's a that's about it. I mean, it just, I think that we addressed most of this stuff. I could do a hand drawing for you too, and just realign these things so we can it, can reaffirm what we were talking about. And you can see, yeah, be awesome. I'll send it via probably more like five o'clock this evening, or whatever. I have one, oh, yeah, I have one more phone call to make for the podcast, but that, that should help a little bit. And then also, it just won't be so much countertop, you know, once we break up a little bit, it will just all look a little more like, like it belongs. Tim 18:25 Okay, what's your quick question underneath the center island? Like where the seating is? Right? Now, it's drawn with, you know, cabinets that open. Is that something that people actually use for, like a feeding area. Here's the here's the thing. Paul McAlary 18:43 It's giving the people that are sitting at the countertop and back there, and you could actually fit more than three. Oh, it says it's three in the one picture, but it's four in the other picture. Yeah, you'll fit four. Oh, yeah. The thing about cabinets is 80% of the price of a cabinet is the doors. So only 20% is the box, or 75 is doors, and 25% is box. So on the back of the island, it looks so much nicer having doors face out, that if you would have, just like put a fake wall there and then cover it with my wood and then put fake doors on it, it would cost you almost the same as having cabinets there. So why not have the storage even though it's a pain in the neck to get to because it's going to cost you the same amount of money. And then, you know, if you have kids put their toys underneath there, they can crawl underneath there and look for or, yeah, decorations or something, but it is a pain in the neck going underneath the countertop to get to that, but it's not really costing you anything. Okay, yeah, I guess the only other question that comes to mind is the wall that you have is that all opened up already the wall that's to the right of this. Stove and the wall that's to the left of those the other pantries that we Tim 20:05 know. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't tell you that everything on, initially, the whole house floor plan, so there's a new construction so we can do kind of whatever we want. But the way it's set up right now is, when you're looking at the stove, to the right is a pocket door that goes into a full size pantry, like a walk in. So I'm even developing whether we need pantry cabinets at all. Right. Then to the left is a pass through to like the storage space and a back hallway, okay? And then behind the chair is actually opening out into the great room, Paul McAlary 20:47 and that, that wall has already been built that that's on the left side and the right side there, correct? So that's fine. I mean, on the left side, it doesn't have to be as deep as it is, if you're going to have base cabinets on the right side, you probably want it that deep only because you want to have the molding on top of the cabinets die into the the wall that's there. Yeah. And you know, the other thing too is you only have one oven in this design, right? Tim 21:20 Yeah, we thought we have a double oven right now, and we never use the two. But I also know it's not a huge step by difference is to put two in. Well, Paul McAlary 21:30 the other thing that you could what you could do too, is, I don't see where's your microwave going in this design. We Tim 21:37 just can do it on the countertop. We have. My current house has a, like, a built in, like above the counter, like built in. And they used to, they used the trim piece, which was fine, until the microwave died. We went to get a replacement, and the trim piece is just as expensive as the microwave. Yeah, it is. I couldn't replace the microwave that I had, so we're just going to put it on the countertop. I mean, you have a lot of that with our plan, which Paul McAlary 22:09 is good, but if you want to put the microwave in the in, you know, you could have another cabinet, if you don't think you even know, if you need this many pantries, you could have one oven cabinet to the right, you could have a built in microwave cabinet and one of the cap pantry cabinet types on the left. And then the trim kit. Whole problem. There are custom manufacturers that make trim kits for any size microwave. And there were 150 Okay, there were $150 a trim kit. You didn't know where to go to get the trim kit, and whoever you talked to didn't know it just looks a lot the microwaves not on your countertop, because you probably might want to have a toaster oven on your countertop and a coffee maker on your countertop. And you know it's just getting one thing off of your countertop, okay? And then there's no reason you could Tim 22:59 also, you could sort of block it off, right do the uppers and the lowers, and just kind of block off the space, sort of like a pantry or where the microwave would sit, yeah, Paul McAlary 23:13 I guess you could. But when you do that too, that makes a working space next to that microwave your elbows are up against the doorway or the wall on one side and the microwave on the other. I mean, just fortune on cabinetry and everything else. So if your microwave does die, you can just Google custom trim kits and then buy any microwave to go into the space. And then you can buy just and it's and you're not buying an expensive microwave. You just buy in a countertop microwave and then ordering a trend that goes with it, so it's not a big deal. And then, if you really wanted to get fancy, you could have that pantry cabinet, if it were oven cabinet on the other side. You know, that doesn't have to be a microwave. It could be a speed oven, which is a microwave convection oven combined, and it's a $2,000 microwave, which really is going to bum you out if that breaks, because it will right, which it will actually the more expensive the appliances are probably and complicated, the more likely they are to break. But yeah, if we got a cheap microwave and you just put a trim kit around it, it wouldn't be an expensive thing, and then it would, would get it off your countertop. Okay, if you want, don't want to do that. I'm just giving you my two bits. You have plenty of countertop. If it actually goes on the countertop all the way over on the left hand, bunch of countertops. You won't even be see it behind the wall right when you're in the great room, you won't be able to see the microwave at all. That's a good place for it, too. Tim 24:45 Okay, alright, Paul McAlary 24:46 anything else, sir, Tim 24:49 no, I think that's, that's it just, you know, eventually I'll, I guess, die at the sticker shock. Want to see how much this is going to cost me. But Paul McAlary 24:57 well, if I, if no one's given you price, you. Yet, with the 54 inch cabinets, you're, I'm sure, well over $30,000 in cabinets if you really want to make this the least expensive thing is this house already built, is already framed and dry. No, Tim 25:16 no, it, it's, we're still in the drawing phases. Yeah. All right. Paul McAlary 25:20 So if you want to save yourself a fortune, then what you can do is lower the ceiling height, not down to nine feet, but to eight and a half feet. So you have a tray ceiling in the middle of the room, and then once it's eight and a half feet, now you get 36 inch high cabinets with six inches of molding on top, that gets you to eight and a half feet, and that's totally standard. There's no cabinets in this design. Now, if the bottom of your tray is eight and a half feet, but your wall cabinets are 40 twos, so it's 42 inch high wall cabinets with six inches of molding on top to get you to eight and a half feet under two inches. But now gotcha, you're not in custom cabinetry at all. Every cabinet brand is going to have all the sizes of all the cabinets that you want. What's what color and style cabinetry? Did you want? It look shaker? Did you want shaker? And what kind of color? Tim 26:20 Yeah, sort of like, like a honey or cinnamon kind of thing. Paul McAlary 26:27 You'll have limited choices in the less expensive lines in those colors. If you did fab you would, I don't know where you're located, Tim 26:37 Dallas. We've a fabulous dealer. Paul McAlary 26:40 So if there's a fabulous dealer, they're only going to have one color that you might even like it all, and that would be called timber. But if you did this, let's say in fab you would in a shaker timber color. Then instead of it being $38,000 or $40,000 in custom cabinets with the the 102 inch soft it's coming down, and the 42 inch wall cabinets and the molding on top, you're all of a sudden now down to more like 20. So okay, it's a huge difference. And with custom cabinets, with the 54 inches and everything else, once you're in custom cabinets, there's all kinds of choices that you make that everything is proportionally more expensive, so the price can exponentially go up when you start taking advantage of some of the options that you have. If you did it in a less expensive brand, in standard sizes, the difference is going to right. If you did it in a less expensive line, like Fabi would, and you went from Fabi wood to a custom line, usually it's 100% less, so usually, okay, 100% more to go to the custom line, right? So it's a gigantic price jump. And you haven't gotten a more durable cabinet. You just gotten the ability to get now all kinds of the wood and all kinds of stains and any size you might want, and any kind of customization you want. For people that need those things and have to have them, you're getting them. But if you could have lived with a middle price cabinet brand, so a fabulous 20, and instead you went to timber lake, or, I don't know, you know, Shenandoah at a low store, or American Woodmark at a Home Depot, or home crest at a private dealer, those will be brands that are middle priced, and they'll be 30 20% more, 25% so then instead of being $20,000 they'd be $25,000 or something like that, and you're still a long way away from 40, right? So, yeah, your choice. It's just that sometimes the dealers don't tell you when you come in that your choices are propelling you into astronomical numbers, because the cabinet sizes you're asking for are only available in Tim 29:00 some Yeah, I did ask the designer say, hey, what do you know? What are your suggestions? Yada yada, yada. And they just sort of regurgitated my plan back to me. And I'm like, well, that's and, and, yeah, Paul McAlary 29:15 that's unfortunate, too. That's really not what we're supposed to be doing. It's sort of the easy road is just you tell me what you give it to you, like what we're not professionals. There's like 30 years of designing kitchen means nothing. The customers just tell us what they want, and we just do it. I mean, if that's the case, you're not much of a professional, right? Yeah, you might have been in the wrong place. There might be other places near you too. That one way to find a kitchen place that might have good designers and have good prices on cabinets is if you go to an independent kitchen place that has craft made that's a brand, okay, read both at Lowe's and Home Depot. So what that just means is that cabinet dealer. Center that has more expense or more higher paid designers than a Home Depot and Lowe's and with more experience, certainly, they can't really compete if they're selling craft made and they're marking it up some kind of astronomical number, because every home center in the area, this is their competition. It's sort of saying, You know what, we're we're competitively priced. So then that sometimes that's a good way, is to look for a craft made dealer that's not a Home Depot or Lowe's, and then you'll find another dealer where their designers may be more experienced, and they certainly can't be crazy expensive, otherwise they wouldn't be successful. Gotcha. So for what that's worth, because craft made is a very cabinet brand, so they finding a craft should be easy, whereas finding a fabulous dealer might not be Tim 30:56 okay. Gotcha. I appreciate your thank you. Your insight. Okay, Paul McAlary 31:01 yeah, it's great talking to you. And if you know, once things get farther along, if you want to have call in again, feel free. And I'll send you some hand drawings. They'll be a little messy, but to give you an idea of what I was talking about when we when I described it to you, and then feel free to call in another another Friday. Tim 31:20 Will do Thank you, Paul. Okay. Thanks, good talking to you. Bye, bye. Mark Mitten 31:24 Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul McAlary. 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. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai