Face frame vs. frameless cabinets

[Dick Keats]

Building a new house. Time had come to build kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Would love to get this group's opinion on face frame vs. frameless. Thanks. Dick

[gfretwell]

Face frame cabinets are stronger and usually cost more. Builders like the faceless style because they don't need anything that even looks like wood on the front except the door so they are usually sawdust with a picture of wood on it..

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, In my life time I had 6 houses custom built, never lived in preowned house. Never had frameless cabinet of anything. Most finishing carpentry was done on-site using real wood. I feel like to have one more built but nearing the end of wrong side of 60, I am hesitating. Building house is always exciting. Frameless looks CHEAP!

[Rick Samuel]

I used face frame on SWMBO kitchen

[dadiOH]

Face frame 1. stronger 2. more work to build 3. more appearance options

Frameless 1. "modern" appearance (like a featureless wall)

[Nate Nagel]

The original kitchen cabinets in my house (of which only one section remains, now being used in the laundry room - sadly) were built like face frame cabinets but did not have a vertical divider between the doors, rather, you had to close the left hand door before the right of each pair (not sure if I got that right or backwards, you get the point.) The ones currently in the kitchen do have vertical dividers. I much prefer the old cabinets. FWIW, YMMV.

nate

[bud--]

For drawers, face frame reduces the available storage volume by the rails separating the drawers. For custom cabinets pseudo rails can be part of the drawer front with frameless drawers looking like face frame.

[RickH]

I've got frameless cabinets with full-overlay doors and I love them. Having that damn moulion gone from the middle of a double door cabinet makes the accessibility great and open. Strength is not a concern, the boxes and shelves are all 3/4 inch plywood, none of the shelves have sagged ,even the wide 48 inch cabinets with double 24 inch doors as there are extra shelf cleats across back too. Having no side moulions also lets me quickly re-height shelves, and install outslider shelves in the bases. The doors are solid wood with floating raised panels. I used to think I needed face frame cabinets, but since living with a quality euro-style for 12 years I'm sold. They even have the full extension drawer slides and huge pot/pan drawers, I couldn't be happier with frameless. But you should still consider the quality of the materials in any cabinet, plywood is best, 3/4 is better, etc. With frameless full-overlay doors/drawers are the norm.

[dadiOH]

Double door face frame cabinets don't have to have a center stile. Mine don't.

[Kyle]

I think the decision also is a matter of custom-built versus "retail" cabinets (as I like to call them). You have more options with having someone build the cabinets than you do with ones made in a factory.

For example, because we had a weird corner in the kitchen that regular cabinets wouldn't handle, my wife and I saved up and had a Mennonite company re-do the kitchen when we bought our house and they were able to do cabinets that have all the postitives of frameless (like no divider between doors) while giving us the structural positives of frame cabinets (not to mention the quality of workmanship is unparalleled in my experience).

As much as I love DIY, I can't recommend enough going with a good custom cabinetmaker as opposed to pre-fabbed cabinets. The kitchen is just one of those places where if you don't think your usage through carefully and spend your money well, you are going to grind your teeth for the next 20 years at what you COULD have done.

[wilsonmian]

Hey Dick, if you take my suggestion, i prefer frameless. Posted from the Free Home Improvement Forum at