Kitchen Base Cabinets — Shaker RTA, Priced for Tampa Pickup

The two numbers everything else is built around

Every base in this line is 34 1/2 inches tall and 24 inches deep. Those are not house-style preferences; they are the pair of figures the rest of an American kitchen is manufactured against. Add a countertop and the work surface lands at roughly 36 inches, which is the height dishwashers and slide-in ranges are made to sit flush with. The 24-inch depth is what lets a standard dishwasher tuck under the counter instead of proud of it.

Width is the variable, and it moves in three-inch steps. Two widths do most of the work in a real kitchen — a 30 and a 36 cover the majority of a plan — with narrow 15s and 18s closing gaps and taking a pull-out.

Same box, six different jobs

• 36-inch Shaker base cabinet — two doors over one drawer — the general-purpose box that fills most of a run
• 36-inch Shaker sink base cabinet — no drawer and no fixed shelf, so the basin, disposal and trap have somewhere to go
• 33-inch Shaker farmhouse sink base cabinet — cut down at the front to carry an exposed apron basin
• 24-inch Shaker drawer base cabinet — a full stack of dovetailed drawers where a door plus a shelf would waste the depth
• 39-inch Shaker blind corner base cabinet — turns a 90-degree corner and hands the hidden half to a pull-out organizer
• 36-inch Shaker lazy susan base cabinet — the other corner answer — a rotating shelf that brings the back of the cabinet to you

Planning a run in the right order

Start at the corners, not at the ends. A corner is the one position where only two boxes will do the job, and both eat width from the walls that meet there — place them first and the remaining spans become simple arithmetic. Next fix the appliances, because a range and a dishwasher have opening widths that no cabinet can borrow from. Only then fill the gaps left over, largest widths first, dropping to narrower boxes as the space closes.

Two habits save the most trouble. Put drawers where you stand — beside the range, across from the dishwasher — because a drawer stack pulls the back of the cabinet out to you while a door and a shelf make you reach into 24 inches of dark. And leave a slim filler wherever the run dies into a wall: out-of-plumb has to be absorbed somewhere, and a filler is cheaper to trim than a face frame.

What is carrying the counter

A base cabinet holds up stone, so the carcass is 1/2-inch plywood with metal L-brackets at the corners rather than particle board and cam locks. Face frames are 3/4-inch solid wood; drawer boxes are 5/8-inch solid wood, dovetailed, on soft-close full-extension undermount slides that bring the whole drawer clear of the frame. Shelves are 3/4-inch adjustable plywood on metal rests, and every panel is CARB P2 / TSCA Title VI compliant. The boxes arrive flat-packed and assemble on site with the hardware in the carton — which is also how a full kitchen gets through a doorway without a crew.