Your Melrose kitchen is a closed room at the back of the house. The first thing most people ask Custom Cabinets Lynn is whether the wall can come out.
Sometimes it can, and then it is a framing job before it is a cabinet job. More often we leave your wall where it stands and give you back the storage it was costing you.
The framing bill on its own buys a great deal of cabinetry, so a full-height pantry run down your blind side is usually the better trade. It holds more than the wall cabinets it replaces, at a fraction of what moving anything structural costs you.
Streetcar-suburb stock went up fast and to a pattern here, so the room you have is the room half your street has. We work the towns inside Route 128 on one rate, and nothing about the drive out from Lynn shows up on your estimate.
We check what your existing hinges can still do before quoting anything new. A run this tight goes out of line the moment one hinge cup pulls and your door sags. None of that is salt, since you are 135 feet up and a long way back from Massachusetts Bay.
We fit Rev-A-Shelf corner pull-outs and a tilt-out tray at your sink where the room has corners nobody can reach. A blind corner in a kitchen this shape is storage that exists on the drawing and nowhere else. Your drawers run on Blum runners rated to 75 lb, and that rating covers the drawer and everything you put in it. In a kitchen this size the deep drawer under the counter is doing a pantry's work.
Melrose at a glance
Semi-custom at $150 to $700 a linear foot suits this stock, because a room your size does not need every box drawn to it. Cabinets built to your opening run $500 to $1,200 and earn that money where a wall has moved.
A pantry unit or a butler's run comes in at $3,000 to $12,000 where you want it built rather than bought. Pull-outs and corner units are a fraction of that, and they are usually the first thing worth doing in a room like yours.
We price a hinge and runner overhaul at $30 to $80 a door and $60 to $180 a drawer. That is where a lot of these kitchens ought to start, and those figures come out of seven tables on our cost guide.
- Coastal exposure
- None. Inland, at 135 ft
- Housing era
- Victorian streetcar suburb, built out after the 1845 railroad
- What changes the job
- Small rear kitchens with no wide opening, so the work is storage inside a fixed footprint
- Sets your permit rules
- City of Melrose building department, under 780 CMR
What cabinets cost in Melrose
We were called to a kitchen off Ell Pond in a house from the streetcar years, where the owner had been quoted twice for taking the back wall out. We left the wall standing, put a full-height pantry run down the blind side and fitted pull-outs into both corners. The cabinets came in semi-custom at $150 to $700 a linear foot. The storage came out ahead of what the open-plan drawing offered. A wall you keep is a wall you can hang cabinets on.
| 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 |
Want yours measured properly?
We 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.
Questions we get from Melrose
Can you open my kitchen into the dining room?
Sometimes, and it changes the job completely. Taking a wall out stops being an ordinary repair the moment structure is touched, so the framing, the header and the filing all come ahead of any cabinets. We will tell you what the storage costs either way, because in a room this size the wall is often worth more standing than gone.
How much more storage can a small kitchen actually gain?
More than most people expect, and it comes out of the corners and the last foot of wall. A corner pull-out reaches shelf space that exists on the plan and nowhere else. A full-height unit holds more than the uppers it replaces. We measure what you already have before quoting, since the answer depends on which of those you are missing.
Do I have to replace the boxes to get soft-close?
No, and a retrofit is $30 to $80 a door or drawer. Converting your whole kitchen runs $600 to $1,600, a long way short of new cabinets at $150 to $700 a linear foot. What it will not fix is a door binding on your frame, because soft-close changes how a door lands rather than how wide it is.