Custom Cabinetry and Woodwork: Cost, Hours and Process in Hacienda Heights

The default reaction to an RV cabinet that failed is to build the replacement out of heavier material. That is the wrong answer, because the factory built it thin for a reason and a heavier cabinet spends cargo capacity you may not have. The right answer is better engineering at similar weight.

In practice that means void free plywood such as Baltic birch rather than particleboard, which is both stronger and lighter per unit of stiffness. It means dadoed and glued joinery rather than staples into end grain. It means torsion box construction for anything spanning a distance, so a shelf gets its stiffness from geometry rather than from thickness. And it means drilling out material where it does no work, which is exactly what the factory did, just done deliberately.

The finished cabinet is typically the same weight as what it replaced or slightly lighter, and it will still be square in fifteen years. That is the whole point of building rather than buying.

• Void free plywood carcases, no particleboard, no solid hardwood boxes
• Dadoed and glued joinery rather than staples into end grain
• Torsion box construction for spans and for anything walked on
• Blum soft close hardware, which matters more in a vehicle than in a house
• Retention lips and positive latching on everything that holds loose items
• Scribe rails at the wall so a cabinet fits a coach that is not square

A coach has no square corners, no plumb walls and no level floor once it is off the jacks. So custom cabinetry for an RV is built to a scribed fit rather than to a nominal dimension. The carcase is built slightly undersized and a scribe rail at each contact face is fitted to the actual wall, which is how a cabinet ends up with no gap at the top and no gap at the wall.

Fastening follows the same discipline as everywhere in this program: into located framing, through cleats that spread load, never into the interior panel alone. On cabinets that will carry weight, the anchoring is designed before the box is built, because it changes where the internal structure has to be.

Finishing is done in the shop, not in the coach. A conversion varnish or catalysed finish sprayed at the bench is more durable and far cleaner than anything brushed in place, and it lets us match sheen to the existing interior rather than accepting whatever the can gives.

The most requested item is a pantry in dead space, usually a tall narrow run beside the refrigerator or in the corner a factory floorplan wasted. The second is a work surface: a fold down desk, a slide out work top, or a small dedicated office run in a bunk room. The third is trim and molding work, which is what makes a remodel read as factory instead of as a project.

Beyond that we build ceiling panels and battens after roof and vent work, accent walls and feature panels, wardrobe and closet interiors, entertainment and fireplace surrounds, and the toe kick and filler details that nobody notices when they are right and everybody notices when they are missing.

The band on this page is 6 to 70 hours at the posted body and paint rate of $210 per hour, and it is genuinely wide because a single fold down desk and a full wall of built ins are both on this page. Because the work is built in house, the calendar is bench time rather than parts lead time, which makes this one of the more predictable schedules in the program.