Cabinets drawn to your room rather than to a catalogue, built for a climate where the federal moisture target is 11 percent instead of the 8 percent the rest of the country works to. Kitchens, vanities, built-ins, closets, refacing and installation across Mobile, Mobile County and Baldwin County.
Custom cabinets in Mobile, AL are cabinets drawn to your room's actual dimensions instead of assembled from a catalogue's fixed widths, and on the Gulf Coast the second half of that definition matters as much as the first: the material specification has to suit a climate the rest of the country does not have. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory publishes a recommended in-service moisture content for interior woodwork of 8 percent across most of the United States and 6 percent in the dry south-west. For the damp, warm coastal area, which on its own map includes Mobile, the figure is 11 percent, with individual pieces running 8 to 13 percent. Cabinet-grade lumber is normally kiln dried to 6 to 8 percent. Every cabinet delivered to a house in Mobile is therefore heading upward in moisture content from the day it arrives, and a shop that has not planned for that is going to hand you doors that bind in August.
That is not a scare story, it is arithmetic you can do yourself. The Wood Handbook gives a dimensional change coefficient for every species and a formula to apply it: change in dimension equals the starting dimension multiplied by the coefficient multiplied by the change in moisture content. A 24 inch wide flat-sawn sugar maple panel going from 7 percent to 11 percent moves 24 x 0.00353 x 4, which is 0.339 inch, near enough eleven thirty-seconds of an inch. The same panel in black cherry moves 0.238 inch, and in American beech it moves 0.414 inch. Nothing about that is avoidable. What is avoidable is designing a door, a finish line or an inset reveal that has no room for it.
Mobile's climate data explains where the movement comes from. NOAA's 1991 to 2020 normals for Mobile Regional Airport record 66.15 inches of precipitation a year, a July normal of 7.25 inches, and a mean dew point on 15 July of 72.0 degrees against 39.4 degrees on 15 January. That is a 32.6 degree seasonal swing in the amount of water the air is carrying, and a wooden door does not get a vote about whether it responds. Air conditioning pulls the indoor figure back down, which is exactly why the Forest Products Laboratory notes that its recommendations assume well ventilated buildings without air conditioning and that in conditioned buildings the result depends on the equipment being correctly sized.
Everything else on this site follows from that. We specify plywood at every sink base and in any cabinet sitting against an exterior wall, we favour species with low tangential movement where a wide panel is unavoidable, and we build in a scribe allowance because settled framing in older Mobile housing is never square. The custom cabinets page goes through the build in detail, and the Gulf Coast materials guide quotes the federal figures in full.
Replace cabinets when the boxes have failed, and reface or repaint them when only the faces have. Most people call at the point where they cannot tell which of those two situations they are in. This is the list that decides it.
The only real difference between the three tiers is who chooses the dimensions. Stock comes in fixed widths, usually 3 inch increments, straight out of inventory. Semi-custom starts from a manufacturer's catalogue and permits modifications to depth, height and finish inside that manufacturer's rules. Custom is drawn to your room, with no catalogue involved at any point. Price follows that hierarchy, and the published national ranges below are HomeAdvisor's, updated 17 June 2026.
| Tier | Per linear foot installed | Per cabinet | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stock | $100 to $300 | $200 to $650+ | Square rooms, standard ceiling heights, rentals and flips |
| Semi-custom | $150 to $650 | $250 to $800+ | Mostly standard rooms with two or three awkward spots |
| Custom | $500 to $1,200 | $500+ | Older or altered houses where almost nothing is standard |
Source: HomeAdvisor cabinet cost guide, updated 17 June 2026. These are national figures. No published dataset breaks cabinet pricing out for Mobile, Alabama specifically, and we are not going to invent one.
Here is the test that settles it without a showroom visit. Take a tape measure to the wall you care about most. Measure it at the floor, at counter height and at the ceiling. If those three numbers differ by more than about half an inch, or if the total run is not a tidy multiple of 3 inches once you subtract what the appliances need, stock cabinets will cost you the difference in filler strips. In midtown Mobile and the older parts of the Eastern Shore, houses that have been through a century of settlement and more than one hurricane, that is the usual answer rather than the exception. The full tier comparison guide works through the edge cases.
Fourteen services, each with its own page and its own detail, because a kitchen and a garage wall and an outdoor bar are three genuinely different specifications even when they are all called cabinets. The services overview covers how they fit together.
Mobile is one of the wettest cities in the United States, and the number that matters for cabinetry is not the rainfall but the dew point. NOAA's 1991 to 2020 normals for Mobile Regional Airport put the mean dew point on a mid-July day at 72.0 degrees and on a mid-January day at 39.4 degrees. Wood tracks the moisture in the air it sits in, so a door hung in January is, by definition, a slightly different width in July.
Annual precipitation normal is 66.15 inches, with July the wettest month at 7.25 inches and October the driest at 3.69. Those are the months that bracket a cabinet installation schedule: a run fitted in October is at the dry end of its year, and a run fitted in July is at the wet end. It changes nothing structural, but it does change how a good installer sets reveals and how much room an inset door needs.
The practical consequences are small, specific and cheap to get right at build time. Plywood rather than particleboard at sink bases. Species with lower tangential movement where a panel has to be wide. A finish that seals end grain as well as faces. Reveals set with the season in mind. None of that is expensive. All of it is impossible to retrofit.
Every cabinet job moves through the same six stages. We give you the stage list rather than a week count, because a week count invented before anybody has measured your room is a sales tactic, not an estimate. The timeline guide explains what actually sets the length of each stage.
Somebody comes to the house with a laser and a notebook and measures the room wall by wall, floor to ceiling, including how far out of square the corners are. Nothing gets drawn from a phone photograph.
The measurements turn into an elevation for every wall, with each cabinet numbered and dimensioned. You approve the drawing before a single board is cut, because the drawing is the thing the shop actually builds from.
Box material is chosen per location rather than per kitchen, door style and overlay are fixed, and the finish system is named. Sink bases and any cabinet against an exterior wall get plywood on the Gulf Coast.
Boxes, face frames, doors and drawers are built and dry-assembled in the shop. Drawer boxes are made and fitted to their slides here, not improvised on site on installation day.
The finish goes on in a controlled space, and the finished cabinets sit in conditioned air before they travel. On this coast the finishing stage is the one the weather lengthens, because humidity sets how long a coat takes to flash off.
Cabinets are levelled, shimmed, screwed to framing and scribed to the walls, then doors and drawers are adjusted. A written punch list closes the job, and hardware alignment is part of it rather than an afterthought.
Roughly half of what a cabinet shop builds is not a kitchen. Bookcases either side of a chimney breast, a window seat with drawers under it, a media wall that hides the cabling, a mudroom bench with lockers over it, a pantry that uses the last 14 inches of wall height everybody else wastes, a garage run that finally gets the paint cans off the floor. They are all the same trade, and they all benefit from the same thing stock cabinetry cannot give you, which is a cabinet that finishes exactly where the wall does.
Built-ins also carry the least risk of the lot. There is no plumbing, no appliance clearance, no countertop template and usually no permit question. If you have never used a cabinet shop before and want to find out how a firm works before handing them a whole kitchen, a run of bookcases or a laundry counter is the sensible way to do it.
Plan on $500 to $1,200 per linear foot installed for custom cabinets and $150 to $650 for semi-custom, which are the national installed ranges HomeAdvisor published on 17 June 2026. Thumbtack, updated 8 July 2026, puts the same tiers at $500 to $1,400 and up per linear foot for custom, $150 to $900 and up for semi-custom, and $75 to $400 and up for stock, and prices installer labour separately at $50 to $70 per linear foot. Two publishers, two methods, and the custom band lands in the same place, which is about as much confidence as published cabinet pricing ever offers.
We will say plainly what most cabinet sites will not: there is no published Mobile-specific cabinet pricing dataset. HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and Homewyse publish national numbers, the RSMeans city cost index is paywalled, and the federal wage tables for this metro are not accessible to automated lookups. Anybody printing a precise Mobile average has made it up. What we can do is print the national ranges honestly, label them as national, and show you how to convert linear feet into a number yourself.
| Run of base cabinets | At $500 per linear foot | At $1,200 per linear foot |
|---|---|---|
| 15 linear feet, small galley | $7,500 | $18,000 |
| 20 linear feet | $10,000 | $24,000 |
| 25 linear feet, typical L-shape | $12,500 | $30,000 |
| 35 linear feet, large kitchen with island | $17,500 | $42,000 |
Our arithmetic, applied to HomeAdvisor's published national per linear foot range for custom cabinets. Measure the run of base cabinets along the wall in feet to get your own figure.
The full cost guide breaks every one of those figures down by tier, by material and by room size, and lists what a quote has to name before it is worth comparing against another one.
Mobile, Alabama had 187,041 residents at the 2020 census, its metro area 430,197, and the Mobile, Daphne and Fairhope combined statistical area 661,964. Baldwin County across the bay held 231,767 and is the fourth most populous county in Alabama. The cabinet requirements at either end of that are not the same, so each place has its own page rather than a template with the city name swapped.
Mobile's older neighbourhoods are the reason custom cabinetry has a market here at all. Streets of raised cottages and bungalows under live oaks, many of them a century old, have been through settlement, storms, re-levelling and at least one previous kitchen. Walls lean, floors run downhill toward the middle of the house, and ceiling heights differ from room to room. Stock cabinets do not negotiate with any of that.
What that means in practice is a scribe allowance on every run that meets a wall, a measurement taken at three heights rather than one, and a toe kick set level to a laser line rather than to the floor. It also means the cabinet quote should carry that allowance as a visible line rather than as a surprise on installation day.
At the other end of the market, Baldwin County's newer subdivisions, the ones behind the growth figures on the Daphne, Fairhope and Spanish Fort pages, are square and plumb and suit semi-custom perfectly well. Both situations are normal, and the honest answer changes depending on which one you are standing in.
Ten guides, written to answer the question rather than to rank for it. Costs, materials, wood species, door styles, finishes, fittings, timeline, permits and the refacing decision, all with the source named.
Published per linear foot and per cabinet figures, what a kitchen of each size works out to at those rates, the add-on lines that quietly move a quote, and a straight answer about why no Mobile-specific price dataset exists.
Read the guide →The federal moisture target for this coastline is three points higher than the rest of the country. What that changes about box material, door construction, finish and sink bases, with the figures quoted in full.
Read the guide →Maple, oak, cherry, walnut, hickory, poplar, magnolia and southern yellow pine, ranked on the one axis that matters here: how far a panel moves when the dew point climbs thirty degrees between January and July.
Read the guide →Three tiers, one real difference: who gets to choose the dimensions. Installed costs for each, the point where each tier stops being able to help, and a filler-strip test that takes two minutes with a tape measure.
Read the guide →Slab, shaker, recessed panel, raised panel, mullion and louvre, plus the overlay question nobody explains. Which cost more, which survive a humid coastal kitchen, and which you can actually wipe down.
Read the guide →Why paint costs more on an identical door, what each finish hides and what it advertises, and which one forgives the seasonal movement a Mobile kitchen puts a door through every single year.
Read the guide →Waste pull-outs, roll-out shelves, tray dividers, corner mechanisms, drawer inserts and soft-close gear. What each one costs you in usable cabinet volume, and which ones people are still using three years later.
Read the guide →Every cabinet job runs through the same six stages. What actually sets the length of each one, which stage the Gulf Coast climate lengthens, and why nobody honest gives you a week count before measuring.
Read the guide →Mobile County lists installing new cabinetry as exempt work, and Alabama requires a home builder licence above ten thousand dollars. Both rules quoted from the source, with every building department linked.
Read the guide →A decision guide, not a sales pitch. The four tests your existing boxes have to pass before refacing is even on the table, what each route costs, and the situations where refacing is simply the wrong answer.
Read the guide →Budget $500 to $1,200 per linear foot installed for true custom cabinets, which is the national range HomeAdvisor published on 17 June 2026, against $150 to $650 for semi-custom and $100 to $300 for stock. Thumbtack's 8 July 2026 figures are close and slightly wider at the top: $500 to $1,400 and up per linear foot for custom, $150 to $900 and up for semi-custom, and $75 to $400 and up for stock. No published dataset breaks cabinet pricing out for Mobile specifically, so anybody quoting you a Mobile-only average has invented it. What we can tell you is that the range is set by cabinet count, box material, door style and finish far more than by which side of Mobile Bay you live on, and that the only number worth anything is the one written down after somebody has measured your room.
At the national installed range of $500 to $1,200 per linear foot for custom, a 15 foot galley works out around $7,500 to $18,000, a 25 foot kitchen around $12,500 to $30,000, and a 35 foot kitchen around $17,500 to $42,000. HomeAdvisor's own worked figures agree: a 10 by 10 kitchen lands between $2,000 and $24,000 across all three tiers, with a typical band of $4,000 to $13,000, and a 12 by 12 runs $2,500 to $29,000. Measure the run of base cabinets along the wall in feet and you have your linear footage.
Custom is worth it when the room refuses to cooperate with 3 inch increments, and stock is the better buy when it does. Stock cabinets come in fixed widths, so an awkward wall gets swallowed by filler strips. Custom cabinets are built to your dimensions, so that same wall becomes a 26 and a half inch drawer bank instead of a 24 inch cabinet and a 2 and a half inch strip of nothing. In older Mobile housing, where almost nothing is plumb or square, that difference is usually what decides it.
Cherry, magnolia, walnut and quartersawn white oak move least across the grain, which is what matters on this coast. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory publishes a tangential dimensional change coefficient for every species: black cherry is 0.00248, southern magnolia 0.00230 and black walnut 0.00274, against sugar maple at 0.00353 and American beech at 0.00431. Run those through the Wood Handbook's own formula and a 24 inch flat-sawn panel moving from 7 percent to 11 percent moisture content shifts about 0.24 inch in cherry and about 0.41 inch in beech. Same room, same season, nearly double the movement.
Because the federal recommendation for this coastline is 11 percent, not the 8 percent used across most of the United States. Wood Handbook FPL-GTR-282 Table 13-2 sets interior woodwork, flooring, furniture and trim at 8 percent average in most areas, 6 percent in the dry south-west, and 11 percent in the damp, warm coastal area, with individual pieces running 8 to 13 percent. Figure 13-1 puts Mobile squarely inside that 11 percent zone. Cabinet stock is normally kiln-dried to 6 to 8 percent, so a cabinet delivered here is heading upward in moisture content from the day it lands.
We will not give you a week count before anybody has measured, because the honest answer depends on the shop's backlog, the door style, the finish and whether the boxes are painted or stained. What we can tell you is the stage list: site measure, design and drawing approval, material order, shop build, finishing, then installation and a punch list. Finishing is the stage this climate lengthens, because a shop that sprays in an unconditioned building on a July afternoon in Mobile, when the mean dew point normal is 72 degrees, waits longer between coats than one spraying in January at 39 degrees.
Four fields is all it takes to start. Somebody comes out, measures properly, and sends back a written scope with a number attached. There is no obligation at any point, and the document is yours to take to a second shop if you want a comparison.
Tell us what you are working with and somebody will come and measure it. Mobile, Saraland, Daphne, Fairhope, Spanish Fort and Gulf Shores.
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