How Custom Cabinetry Is Priced

A linear foot of cabinetry is one foot of run measured along the wall. Base cabinets and wall cabinets are measured separately along the same wall, and tall units such as pantries and oven towers count once at full height. An island is measured along its long side. The PineWood pricing engine, which is the arithmetic behind our kitchen cost calculator, uses linear feet as its sole sizing input, and the calculator’s slider runs from 4 feet to 80. If you give it nothing, it assumes 20 and tells you so in its list of assumptions.

Linear feet is a better unit than square feet of floor or number of cabinets because it tracks the work. Every foot of run carries panel stock for the box, a door or drawer front, a drawer box or a shelf, hinges or runners, edge treatment, finish on every visible face, and time at the bench and on the wall. A kitchen with more floor area but the same run of cabinetry does not cost more to cabinet; a kitchen with a long pantry wall and a modest floor plan does. Measure the run and you have measured the job.

The engine also derives one count from the length: it estimates doors at 2.2 per linear foot, rounded, so a 20-foot kitchen is assumed to have 44 doors and drawer fronts for the purpose of pricing soft-close hardware. That assumption is recorded in the estimate’s assumptions list. A real kitchen might have more small drawers or fewer tall doors, and the shop drawings at the end of design replace the estimate with the actual count.

Layout comes first. A single wall is the reference at 1.00. An L-shape multiplies by 1.15, a kitchen with an island by 1.22, and a U-shape by 1.28. The reason is in the corners and the exposed sides: each corner is two runs that meet, with a filler, a return, and a corner cabinet or a dead space to resolve; an island is a run finished on all four sides with end panels and its own toe kick; a third wall is another surface to scribe to. For the default kitchen the L-shape takes $31,000 – $40,000 to $35,650 – $46,000.

Door style is second. Shaker is the reference at 1.00, slab is 1.10, and raised panel is 1.20. A slab door is a single flat panel with nothing to hide a flaw behind, which is why it is weighted above Shaker; a raised panel is a profiled solid panel captured in a frame, with more machining and more finishing surface than either. The default kitchen is Shaker, so this step changes nothing in the worked example.

Finish is third. Natural clear coat is 1.10, painted is 1.15, and stained is 1.28. The default kitchen is painted, which takes the running total to $40,997.50 – $52,900. Hardware level is fourth: standard is 1.00, premium is 1.10, and designer is 1.22. The default is premium, which takes the total to $45,097.25 – $58,190. At this point every multiplier has been applied and the estimate turns to the things that are counted rather than weighted.

The sequence matters because the factors compound. A U-shaped kitchen with raised-panel doors, a stained finish, and designer hardware multiplies the base by 1.28, then 1.20, then 1.28, then 1.22, which is a combined factor of roughly 2.4 on the base rate. That compounding is why the engine can produce a band in the hundreds of thousands for a kitchen that is not physically large, and why the drivers spoke in this guide ranks the multipliers rather than treating them as equals.

The last step is padding. The computed low is multiplied by 0.92 and the computed high by 1.12, and both are rounded to the dollar only at that final step. For the default kitchen, $48,217.25 – $63,670 becomes $44,360 – $71,310, which is the figure the calculator displays. The padding is asymmetric on purpose: an estimate made before a site visit is more likely to grow than to shrink, because the things a site visit finds, out-of-plumb walls, a soffit that has to go, a run that is two feet longer than remembered, add work rather than remove it.

The engine also reports a confidence level. It is high when linear feet, door style, finish, and hardware level were all supplied; medium when linear feet was supplied but one or more of the others was assumed; and low when linear feet itself was assumed. The calculator always supplies every input, so it always reports high confidence, with the qualifier cabinetry scope beside it. The confidence label describes how much the engine had to guess about your selections. It does not describe how close the band is to a quote, because that depends on the room, which the engine has never seen.

Every estimate also carries a record of its assumptions, the version of the pricing configuration used, and a hash of its inputs. That is why two people who enter the same inputs get the same band on different days: the engine is deterministic, it never uses randomness, and it is monotonic, so a more expensive choice never produces a lower figure. Those properties make it a good instrument for comparison, which is how the drivers spoke in this guide uses it.