Shop-made cabinetry for a 1938 house in Hayes Barton, Raleigh

The scope

A 1938 house in Hayes Barton with a kitchen that had been altered three times, most recently in the 1980s. Two different cabinet styles, a boxed-in radiator, and an original casement window painted shut for decades with a rotten sill.

The owners did not want a new kitchen. They wanted a kitchen that looked like it had always been in this house, which is a harder brief and a more interesting one.

The challenge

Nothing in a house of this age is straight. The plaster walls bow, the floor falls nearly thirty millimetres across the room, and no corner is ninety degrees.

Modern frameless cabinetry is built on the assumption that all three of those things are false. Put a run of it against a bowed plaster wall and you get a wavering gap that gets filled with caulk and looks like exactly what it is.

The other constraint was the window. It was original, it was the correct window for the house, and it was rotten at the sill. Replacing it with a modern unit would have been cheaper and would have been the wrong answer for a house on that street.

What we did

Inset face-frame cabinetry, made in our shop, painted rather than stained, with the door and drawer proportions taken off the surviving original built-in in the hallway.

Face-frame construction exists precisely for this situation: the frame can be scribed to the wall and the doors hung to the frame, so the cabinetry sits true even where the wall does not. Every run was scribed to the plaster on site rather than caulked. The base run was shimmed to level and the toe kick scribed to the falling floor, so the counter is level and the gap at the floor is even.

The window was repaired rather than replaced: the rotten sill section cut out and spliced with new timber, the sash freed, reglazed with traditional putty and rehung on new cord. It opens.

Details on how we build cabinetry are on the custom cabinetry page.

The outcome

Five weeks from first cut in the shop, of which nine days were on site. The visible test is the gap where the cabinetry meets the plaster, and there is not one you would notice.

The radiator came out of its box and back into the room, which the owners had assumed was not possible.

Finished 23 January 2026.