Understanding Natural Wood Grain Shaker Style Kitchen Cabinets
This week and this coming next week we’re going to look at a few examples of different kitchen cabinets. These happen to be in a Shaker style. style cabinets are really common. They’ve become popular in recent decades. Some of the ones that we are looking at today and in this coming week are a little bit different because instead of having a lacquer or painted finish, these are exposed wood grain. In some cases, the exposed wood grains we see on cabinet doors and cabinet boxes are either veneers or sometimes thermally fused laminate also known as melamine. In other words, many of the examples we commonly see of exposed wood grain aesthetics on cabinets are entirely fake.
Wood veneer, technically, isn’t entirely fake because the exposed surface is real to the extent that it comes from an actual tree. It’s an artifice though because it’s made to look like real wood but in reality is just a tiny little slice of wood glued onto the surface of some other type of fake wood byproducts such as particle board. Here though, in contrast, these doors and the substrate American style door frames are solid wood with a satin sheen clear lacquer.
In the picture below, the frame and door are shown as an example. Here, instead of being installed at the outer face of a typical cabinet box, they are just set resting on top of a natural granite stone countertop. This particular type of countertop stone is often referred to as “White Ice”.
This particular type of stone comes from Brazil. Sometimes it’s also referred to as Aspen White, which sounds a bit more like it’s from North America, but it’s actually from deep inside of South America. It doesn’t really look white and it doesn’t really look anything like ice either, in our humble opinion. But in the trades, that’s a common name for this stone.
There’s several other types of granite that are very common. Some of them are on the entry level side of the cost spectrum for granite. Names and marketing monikers can also change, depending on working trends. In this case, with the recent history of the USA Federal government’s ICE being associated with white nationalism, they might change the name just to make it sound less controversial, from a marketing perspective.
Granite slabs like this are generally available in two or three cm thicknesses. The 2 cm is roughly of 3/4 of an inch thick and the 3 cm is roughly 1-3/16 inch thick. If you’re wondering why they measure things like countertops in centimeters instead of inches, it’s a good question but the answer should be obvious. These countertops are generally milled from quarries of ancient stone from millions of years ago.
Most of the quarries are in places like Europe and BRICS countries like Brazil, India, and China. The USA also has a lot of quarries which can be used for sourcing granite, but those colors are generally a little bit more gray and darker. People are really generally more interested in some of the brighter colors that come from places like Brazil and India.
So in renovating a kitchen, you’ll find that different parts of the kitchen are measured, detailed, and designed in different units. The cabinets will almost always be designed and described using inches. There are some European exceptions, but in most cases people describe cabinets in feet and inches, not millimeters in centimeters. The width of semi-custom cabinets will generally come in options for increments of 3 in. The smallest drawer bases, for example, generally start around 9 in width and can be as large as 36 inches width.
Some sizes are more common, but generally there are options for every increment of 3 in between 9 in wide and 36 in wide. There are even some less common exceptions where they can be even larger.
In this coming week, we’ll talk about some of the common increments of height for both base cabinets and wall cabinets. We will also look at some of the particular details related to this type of natural grain wood cabinet door frame and door leaf.
Dupont Kitchen & Bath Can Help
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