Lynn and Essex County
We build and fit cabinets for houses that stopped being square a long time ago. We cut the end panel to follow your wall instead of hiding the gap with a strip.
Custom cabinets in Lynn, MA get built for houses with a median construction year of 1946. The walls are plaster over wood lath, and almost nothing in them sits at a true 90 degrees. Custom Cabinets Lynn builds to your opening at $500 to $1,200 a linear foot, and we do far more of the fast work than the slow. Refacing your kitchen runs $5,000 to $13,000, spraying it runs $2,000 to $6,500, and swapping the doors and drawer fronts runs $2,200 to $6,600. Every one of those numbers is on our cabinet cost guide with its source under it.
We measure your opening at three heights and size the run to the tightest one. Then we cut the end panels and the front frame to follow the wall that is actually there. Your boxes are 3/4-inch hardwood plywood, and if you want to know what is in the glue, we can order panels made with no added formaldehyde. Your drawers run on Blum slides rated to carry 75 lb. Where a drawer has to carry more than that, we fit a heavier side-mounted slide instead of hoping the standard one holds.
What that gets you is a quote you can check line by line. Four things decide whether a kitchen still looks right in fifteen years: the box, how the door is built, the hardware and the finish. All four are named as separate lines on our estimate before anything is ordered. We would rather explain now why a loose door panel costs more than a glued one than have you find out in February, when the glued one splits down the middle.
Nobody wants to pay for new cabinets and then look at a wedge-shaped strip where the run meets the wall. About half of Lynn's houses went up before 1940, so your walls have had a century to move. We cut the end panel to follow the plaster instead of filling the gap. On your quote that line is called scribing, it costs $450 to $1,600 on top of the run, and we put it where you can see it.
You should not have to fill in a form to find out what a kitchen costs. Our cost guide has seven price tables, each with its source, and it gives you the per-foot figure as well as the job total. A per-foot number is the only one that lets you hold two quotes side by side. Where no trade source publishes a fair range for a line, the row says so instead of carrying a number we made up.
Refacing is new doors and a new skin over your old boxes. Put that over a box that has swollen under a slow leak and the new face lifts inside a year, and the veneer gets the blame. So we push a blade into the floor of your sink cabinet and the panel beside your dishwasher before we price anything. Replacing a failed box is $400 to $1,400, and it goes on as its own line so you can see which cabinet we mean.
If you live in Nahant, Swampscott, Marblehead, Winthrop or along the Revere shore, salt comes in through open windows and settles on metal. Plain steel hinges and drawer slides rust, start to bind, and your doors drift out of line two to four years in, long after anyone connects it to the install. On any house near the water we order the rust-resistant finish on hinges, slides and screws. Refitting a door that has already dropped is $120 to $600, and we would rather you never needed it.
Indoor humidity in a heated house here drops below 20% in February and climbs into the sixties by August. Wood swells and shrinks with that, about 1% for every 4% change in its own moisture. A door panel glued into its frame has nowhere to go, so it splits down the middle, and it happens in February rather than in the first month. We leave the panel loose in its frame and finish all six faces before we put the door together. A door built that way is part of what $500 to $1,200 a foot buys you, and it never shows you a raw edge.
Plenty of the kitchens we look at do not need anything built. If your boxes are sound and the layout works, spraying them at $2,000 to $6,500 changes more for less money than anything else we sell, and we will say so instead of quoting you a kitchen. More than half of Lynn's homes are rented, so a lot of our work is exactly that. We would rather lose the job and be the shop you call in five years than sell you $20,000 of cabinets you did not need.
Your layout stays where it is and every surface you can see changes. Whether that is a good buy depends on the boxes, not on the doors.
Every complaint about a painted kitchen traces back to prep or to cure time. Neither of those is the paint, and neither shows on the day you get it back.
Your doors got tight one season and easy again the next. That is wood doing what wood does in a heated house, and it changes what the fix should be.
New faces on the boxes you already have. It is the cheapest real change to a kitchen, and it has one honest catch nobody mentions on the phone.
Refinishing takes the old finish off rather than covering it. That is only worth paying for when what is underneath is worth looking at.
Boxes are square and Lynn walls are not. Everything worth paying an installer for happens in the gap between those two facts.
Custom means every box is drawn to a size somebody measured in your kitchen. In a house from 1946 that is worth more than it sounds.
A sprayed door has no brush line in it, and a catalyzed finish is harder than anything you can brush. Both cost more, and only one of them is worth it on every kitchen.
Stain is a dye, not a coating, so the wood you already own decides most of the outcome. That is why the same color lands differently on oak and on maple.
Your bathroom asks more of a cabinet than your kitchen does and gives it less room to work in. That is what decides between a catalog unit and one built to the opening.
Hardware is the cheapest thing in your kitchen to put right, and you touch it forty times a day. Most of this work books and finishes inside a week.
Catalog boxes with real choices on door, finish and some sizes. On most kitchens it is the honest answer, and the trade it asks of you is measured in inches.
A rail of winter coats is the heaviest thing per foot in your bedroom, and it hangs off a wall made of plaster over lath. That is the problem a walk-in has to solve.
Everything in a reach-in happens behind a door narrower than the closet. What you can reach writes the layout, and what the wall is made of decides how it stands up.
The cabinet under your sink is the one that fails first in almost every kitchen. What it is made of decides whether it can be dried out or has to come out.
An island is the only cabinet in your kitchen with no wall behind it. The floor is the only reference it has, and in this housing stock the floor has moved.
There is a published number for how much your cabinet shelf has to hold. Once you know it, a bowed shelf stops being your fault and starts being a question about how it was built.
A tall pantry is the largest single box that goes into a house, and it shows every degree your wall is out. That is why this run gets trimmed to the wall rather than pushed into place.
Thermofoil is a thin plastic skin pressed onto a board. Heat lifts it off, and nothing glues it back down. It is always the same few doors in your kitchen.
Between 45.7% and 58.0% of the housing here was built before 1940. Nothing in those kitchens is straight, level or square, and your cabinets have to be drawn around that.
You lean on a desk, and that is the whole difference between a desk and a shelf. Everything in this room gets sized for what leans on it or what gets stacked in it.
Books are the heaviest thing you will ever put on a shelf. The shelf that sags in your room is almost never the cheapest one, it is the longest one.
The original cabinetry in your Marblehead or Salem kitchen is usually worth keeping and easy to ruin. Most of the damage we see was done by a sander.
Your laundry has one appliance that shakes, one that throws off heat, and a floor that is rarely flat. A run of cabinets in here gets planned around all three.
Two to four years after a kitchen goes in, your doors on the shore side stop sitting right. The wood is fine and the steel inside your hinges is not.
Your back door is where the house takes the weather, and a bench in it is furniture you sit on in wet boots. Both of those change how it gets built.
The boxed-in strip above your wall cabinets is either empty or full of pipes and wires. Which one you have decides whether this is a day of work or a different project.
Your bay is not a rectangle, and its two side walls almost never come back at the same angle. That is the whole job, and it is why a seat gets patterned instead of ordered.
Your garage has no heat and no humidity control, so the wood in it moves further than the wood in your kitchen. Everything here gets built for that, beginning with the doors.
An inset door shows you the gap all the way around it from across the room. That is why it costs more to make, and why yours gets set for the wet end of the year.
Your choice of wood here is a decision about movement before it is one about color. Your house goes from bone dry in February to damp in August, and the wood goes with it.
Everything that decides how long your kitchen lasts sits behind the doors, and none of it shows in a showroom. These are the lines worth looking for on a quote.
Filler strips are how a shop hides a wall that was never straight. We cut the end panel to fit the wall instead, and you see the difference from the doorway every day.What we tell people before we measure
More than half of Lynn's occupied units are rented, so a lot of our work is a kitchen that has to be back in service by the first of the month. Refacing or spraying keeps your layout and finishes inside a week at $2,000 to $6,500. A door and drawer front swap at $180 to $330 a door changes the look of a unit for a fraction of what new boxes cost.
If you own several units we would rather write one spec and repeat it than quote each kitchen from scratch. You get the same door, the same hardware and the same finish in every unit. A damaged door in unit 4 is then a stock item rather than a custom order, and over five years that is worth more than any discount we could give you.
Your association usually sets the hours, the elevator booking and how the hallway gets protected, and we work to that rather than around it. Made-to-order doors and drawer boxes arrive in 1 to 2 weeks, against 4 to 12 weeks for a full custom build. That matters a great deal when your delivery window is one Tuesday morning.
A reception desk or a treatment-room run gets opened and closed far harder than a home kitchen, so it takes a heavier spec. We build those to that heavier spec and we say on the quote which lines carry it. Danvers and the Route 128 corridor bring us most of this work, and we quote it by the linear foot the same way we quote a kitchen.
Your box is 3/4-inch hardwood plywood, glued into grooves at every joint, and we name the panel on the order so you can check it on delivery. If you want it, we order panels made with no added formaldehyde, which matters in a kitchen because every cut edge sits in the room's air. Particleboard boxes are cheaper, and they are the ones that swell under a sink and never dry back.
A five-piece door has a center panel sitting loose inside a frame, with small rubber spacers holding it centered, and all six faces finished before the door is put together. That is what lets it shrink and swell through a heating season without splitting or showing a raw line at the edge. Inset doors sit inside the frame rather than over it, so every gap is on show, and the hours spent getting those gaps even are most of what you pay for.
Your drawer boxes are solid hardwood with interlocking dovetail corners, built to your opening rather than to a catalog width. A Massachusetts shop in Lawrence cuts them on a 1 to 2 week lead, which is why the fast half of this trade is fast. The Blum slides under them carry 75 lb, and the widest drawer next to your range is the one that finds that limit first.
On site we spray a water-based enamel like Benjamin Moore ADVANCE. It flows out smooth like an oil paint and does not yellow over a white door the way an old oil enamel does. It can be recoated after 16 hours, reaches full hardness at 30 days, and needs 3 to 5 days before anything goes back on a shelf. If you want the factory look, your doors leave the house and get a two-part varnish sprayed in a booth, at $1,200 to $3,600 added.
Start with the box, because it is the line most quotes leave vague. Ask what the box is made of and whether the shelves were tested to carry weight. A shelf that bows under a stack of dinner plates was never built to hold them, and that is a question with an answer rather than a claim about how well something is made.
Then look for the lead-safe line. The median house in Lynn went up in 1946, so most of these kitchens predate 1978. That puts yours under the Massachusetts lead-safe work rules once more than 6 square feet of painted surface is disturbed, and sanding one wall of original cabinets clears 6 square feet in the first ten minutes. It means the room gets sealed off, nothing gets dry sanded, and the cleanup is a HEPA vacuum and a wet wipe rather than a broom. Containment and cleanup run $350 to $1,200. A quote without that line is not cheaper than one with it. It is describing a different job.
Check the money last, and check it against the law rather than your gut. A deposit on a Massachusetts home job is capped at one third of the total price, or the actual cost of special-order material if that is more. Over $1,000 the agreement has to be written and signed before work starts, with the total price, the payment schedule and the start and finish dates on it. A custom kitchen is special-order by definition, so the material carve-out is real there. A request for half up front on catalog boxes is a number worth asking about.
We write our estimates so all three of those are already on the page. You should not have to ask us for the box spec, the containment or the dates. If a quote in front of you leaves any of them out, go back and ask about that before you compare totals.
Fully custom cabinetry in Lynn runs $500 to $1,200 per linear foot installed, or $10,000 to $26,500 for a 10x10 kitchen. Semi-custom runs $150 to $700 per foot and stock $100 to $400. What moves the number is the box, the door and how far out of square the wall is.
| What the job is | Typical range | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Fully custom cabinetry, built to the openingDrawn to your kitchen rather than assembled from catalog sizes. Any width, any height, any depth, and no filler strips standing in for a wall that is not straight. | $500 – $1,200 | per linear foot, installed |
| High-end custom: inset doors, specialty species, hand-applied finishInset doors sit inside the frame rather than over it, which means every reveal has to be even and every one is visible. That is where the hours go. | $1,200 – $2,500 | per linear foot, installed |
| Semi-custom cabinetryCatalog boxes with real choices on door style, finish and some sizes. The middle of the market and the honest answer for most Lynn kitchens. | $150 – $700 | per linear foot, installed |
| Stock cabinetryFixed sizes off a shelf, usually in three-inch increments. Cheapest per foot, and the version most likely to need filler strips against a pre-1940 wall. | $100 – $400 | per linear foot, installed |
| Fully custom 10x10 kitchenThe standard comparison kitchen the industry prices against, roughly 20 linear feet of cabinetry. Use it to sanity-check a quote, not to price your own room. | $10,000 – $26,500 | installed |
| Stock or semi-custom 10x10 kitchenThe same comparison kitchen in catalog boxes. The gap against the custom line above is the whole decision in one number. | $3,000 – $11,000 | installed |
| Building and installation labor alone, on custom workRuns 25% to 40% of the total on a custom job. Worth knowing, because a quote where labor is far under that is either using catalog boxes or leaving something out. | $200 – $300 | per linear foot |
| Installing cabinets you already haveHanging, leveling, scribing, joining and setting the doors on boxes bought elsewhere. The spread is mostly about how true the walls and floor are. | $4,500 – $15,000 | per kitchen |
| A published North Shore figure for the same job, Salem MAOne live, published, local number for a full cabinet installation. Carried because it is the only one in this table that came from this side of the state, and because it sits above the top of the national custom range. | $28,564 | as quoted |
| Scribing and leveling a run into a pre-1940 openingPlaster over lath, a floor that has settled, and no corner at a true 90 degrees. Scribing the end panels and stiles to the real wall instead of filling the gap. On a 1946 kitchen this is normal work, not an extra. | $450 – $1,600 | added to the job |
We take the opening at three heights and check how far the floor and the walls have drifted. On a pre-1940 house that measurement is the job. Everything after it is sized to the tightest of those three numbers, never the widest.
Your estimate names the box, the door style and how it is built, the hardware, the finish and the fitting as separate lines. The wall fitting and any lead-safe containment show as their own lines rather than being folded into a total. The in-home measure costs you nothing whether you go ahead or not.
Made-to-order doors and drawer boxes arrive in 1 to 2 weeks. A full custom kitchen built to your opening takes 4 to 12 weeks. We tell you which queue you are in at the estimate, because that is usually the thing people most want to know.
We level the run, join it, cut the end panels to the wall and hang it. Then we set every door and drawer until the gaps read even down the whole run. We set those gaps for the damp end of the year rather than the dry one, so nothing binds on you in August.
A sprayed finish is dry to the touch long before it is hard. Keep the shelves light for 3 to 5 days and go easy on it for the full 30 days. We would rather say that out loud than have you find fingernail marks in a new kitchen.
Every door in our 1938 kitchen had gone tight and 2 would not shut at all. He told us it was the heating season rather than the hinges, took 3 doors off, trimmed and rehung them for $340, and said to call back in July if they rattled. They did not.
Karen M. Swampscott
Sticking doorsWe were quoted $9,400 to reface. He pushed a blade into the floor of the sink base, showed us it had swollen through, and said new veneer over it would lift within a year. Replacing that 1 box was $780 and the reface came in at $7,200. Nobody else opened the door.
Dennis O. Peabody
RefacingThe quote named the paint and the cure window, which none of the other 2 did. He said 30 days to full hardness and to keep the plates off the shelves for 5, and he wrote it on the estimate. That was the reason we picked him.
Alina R. Marblehead
Cabinet paintingOur back wall is out by nearly an inch across 12 feet and the last shop wanted to close it with a filler strip. He scribed the end panel to the plaster instead. You cannot see the join from the doorway, which is the whole thing we were paying for.
Marcus T. Salem
Out-of-square wallsWe come out, measure the opening at three heights and check how far off square your walls sit, then put a written number on it before anything is ordered.
$500 to $1,200 per linear foot installed, or $10,000 to $26,500 for a 10x10 kitchen. Semi-custom is $150 to $700 a foot and stock is $100 to $400. A linear foot is measured along the wall your cabinets run down. It is the one figure that makes two quotes comparable.
Reface while your boxes are sound, at $5,000 to $13,000 against $10,000 to $26,500 for new custom cabinets. Replace once the sink cabinet has swollen through or you want the layout changed, because refacing keeps every dimension where it is.
$2,000 to $6,500 for a standard kitchen with the doors off and sprayed, or $30 to $70 per linear foot. Cabinets in poor condition add 20% to 45%, because peeling finish and brittle old varnish take stripping time, and we add that rather than bury it.
Days for the fast work and weeks for a built kitchen. Your doors and drawer boxes arrive in 1 to 2 weeks, against 4 to 12 weeks for a full custom build. On a painting job the finish needs 3 to 5 days before you reload the shelves and 30 days to full hardness.
Not for the cabinets themselves. The state building code treats a straight swap as an ordinary repair, as long as nothing changes in the plumbing, gas, wiring, structure or exits. Moving your sink, adding a range circuit or taking out a wall is what changes the answer.
Two reasons, and both are on our cost guide. Our labor sits inside a Boston-area wage market, and between 45.7% and 58.0% of Lynn's housing predates 1940. That adds $450 to $1,600 of wall fitting and leveling that a national figure never counts.
It means we seal off your room and nothing gets dry sanded. On a home built before 1978, the Massachusetts lead-safe rules apply once more than 6 square feet of painted surface is disturbed. Cleanup is a HEPA vacuum and a wet wipe. It costs you $350 to $1,200 per job.
No more than one third of the total price, or the actual cost of special-order material if that is higher. A custom kitchen is special-order by definition, so its material cost can fairly go past a third. On catalog boxes it usually cannot.
Roughly $400 a linear foot between the ends of it. Custom is drawn to your opening in any width at $500 to $1,200 a foot. Semi-custom gives you catalog boxes with real door and finish choices at $150 to $700. Stock comes in fixed three-inch steps at $100 to $400.
Because indoor humidity here swings from below 20% in February to the sixties in August, and wood moves about 1% for every 4% change in its own moisture. A gap set in the dry months has nowhere left to go by the damp ones. We trim and rehang a single door for $120 to $600.
That is most of what we do here. We measure your opening at three heights, size the run to the tightest, and cut the end panels to follow the plaster at $450 to $1,600 on top of the run. The alternative is a filler strip, which is a gap with a board over it.
Yes, and they are often the better first job. We replace a vanity for $400 to $2,200 with the unit included, build a custom vanity to an awkward opening for $1,500 to $6,500 complete, and fit a reach-in closet for $1,046 to $3,210.
Sometimes, and it is worth checking before you spend anything else. A hinge swap is $30 to $80 a door and we do them in pairs. Rehanging and re-squaring a whole run after the floor has settled runs $220 to $700. Soft-close changes how your door lands, not how wide it is.
Four lines. What the box is made of, the wall fitting and leveling at $450 to $1,600, the lead-safe containment at $350 to $1,200 on a pre-1978 kitchen, and the start and finish dates. If any of those is missing, you cannot compare the totals.
Custom Cabinets Lynn builds, refaces, paints and repairs cabinets across Lynn and the twenty towns around it in Essex, Middlesex and Suffolk counties. Your in-home measure is free, our prices are published, and we will tell you when spraying what you have beats building something new.
Almost every bad cabinet job we get called to started with a number given over the phone. We would rather come out, measure your opening at three heights, and hand you an estimate that names the box, the door, the hardware, the finish and the fitting separately.
If you already know roughly what you want, our cost guide has all seven price tables with their sources. If you are still deciding between fixing and replacing, refacing against replacing is the short version, and everything we handle lists the rest.
We cover Lynn and the rest of Essex County, plus the Middlesex and Suffolk towns listed above. If your address is not on the list, ask us, because the drive is usually the only thing that changes.
Send what you know. We measure on site, then price the box, the door, the hardware and the fitting as separate lines.