How to Measure Your Kitchen for New Cabinets

Most cabinet orders that go wrong went wrong here, not at the factory. An hour with a tape measure and a method is the cheapest insurance in the whole project. Here is the method.

What you need

A steel tape, a pencil, paper, and someone to hold the other end. Draw the room roughly to scale before you measure anything — a sketch you can write on beats a list of numbers you cannot place later.

Measure the walls three times

Take each wall at three heights: near the floor, at about countertop height, and up near the ceiling. Write down all three. If they differ, and they usually do, the smallest number is the one that matters — cabinets have to fit the tightest point, not the average. A wall that is an inch out over ten feet is completely normal and completely fatal if you planned on the wide reading.

Measure ceiling height in each corner too. Floors slope. A run planned to finish flush with the ceiling on one side can stand proud of it on the other.

Mark everything that interrupts a wall

• Windows: width, height, and the distance from the floor to the sill and from the corner to the frame.
• Doors: the opening, plus which way the door swings and how far it travels into the room.
• Appliance openings: the range, the fridge, the dishwasher and the hood. Record the opening you need, not the appliance you own now.
• Plumbing: where the waste and supply come through, measured from the corner and from the floor.
• Electrical: outlets, switches and anything that has to stay reachable once the run is in.
• Vents, radiators, meters, boxed-in pipes and anything else fixed that a cabinet cannot go through.

Corners deserve their own note

Write down what happens in every corner. A cabinet needs clearance for its door and drawers to open past the run that meets it, and the usual fix is a filler of an inch or two. Corners are also where the specialized units earn their keep — a blind base or a lazy susan turns dead space into storage.

Check whether the room is square

Two walls that both measure correctly can still meet at something other than a right angle, and a countertop will show it immediately. Measure the diagonal across the corner between two points an equal distance out along each wall — three feet and four feet is the classic, and the diagonal should read five feet. If it does not, the corner is out, and whoever fits the run needs to know that before they start rather than after.

Do the same for the floor. Find the highest point along the run with a level and a straight edge, because that is the point every base cabinet will be shimmed up to. A floor that falls an inch across a kitchen is ordinary in an older Georgia house and completely manageable, as long as nobody discovers it on fitting day.

Photograph everything

Take pictures of each wall straight on, then the corners, then anything unusual. Photographs answer the questions your sketch will not have anticipated, and they cost nothing. Include a shot of the appliance data plates while you are there — the model numbers are the fastest way to confirm an opening.

What to send us

The sketch, the wall measurements at all three heights, the ceiling height, the appliance openings, and the door style you are leaning toward. With that we can lay the run out against what we hold in the Norcross warehouse and tell you where it lands on stock sizes and where it needs a filler. Ask for a sample door in the same message, so the finish is settled before the order is.

Call (470) 564-9496 or send the measurements through. We supply seventy cities across metro Atlanta from one warehouse, collection or delivery.