Every cabinet service we cover in Mobile, AL
There are fourteen services on this site and they divide into five honest groups: kitchen cabinetry, bathrooms and storage, garage and outdoor, renewing what is already there, and fitting and hardware. That grouping is not marketing tidiness. Each group has a different risk profile, a different set of dependencies on other trades, and in two cases a genuinely different material specification, because a garage in Mobile and a kitchen in Mobile are not the same environment even though they are twenty feet apart.
The one thing all fourteen share is the constraint this coastline puts on them. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory recommends an in-service moisture content of 11 percent for interior woodwork in the damp, warm coastal area, against 8 percent across most of the United States, and NOAA's 1991 to 2020 normals for Mobile Regional Airport record a mean dew point of 72.0 degrees in mid-July against 39.4 degrees in mid-January. Every service below is specified with those two numbers in mind, and the ones that live outside air conditioning are specified harder.
Kitchen cabinetry
The largest part of the trade, and the part with the most dependencies. A kitchen job touches plumbing, electrical, countertops and appliances, so it is the one where the drawing matters most.
Kitchen cabinets
Full runs of uppers, bases, tall pantries and appliance surrounds, drawn wall by wall. This is where box material per location, door overlay and the scribe allowance all get settled.
Full detail on kitchen cabinets→Kitchen islands
An island is a clearance problem before it is a cabinet problem. The published working figure is 42 to 48 inches of aisle on a working side, and an island that breaks it is a permanent irritation.
Full detail on kitchen islands→Custom cabinets
The umbrella service. Cabinets drawn to your room's real dimensions rather than assembled from fixed catalogue widths, with material specified for Gulf Coast moisture.
Full detail on custom cabinets→Bathrooms, closets and storage
Lower risk than a kitchen, higher return per dollar in most houses, and the usual place to start if you have not used a cabinet shop before.
Bathroom vanities
A vanity lives in the wettest, least ventilated room in the house. Box material and a sealed underside matter more here than anywhere except an outdoor kitchen.
Full detail on bathroom vanities→Closets and pantries
Walk-in systems and pantry fit-outs that use the top 14 inches of wall height everybody else wastes, with adjustable shelving rather than fixed.
Full detail on closets and pantries→Built-ins and media walls
Bookcases, window seats, media walls and fireplace surrounds. No plumbing, no appliances, no countertop template, and usually no permit question at all.
Full detail on built-ins and media walls→Laundry and mudroom
Folding counters, upper storage over machines, drop zones, lockers and bench seats, all sized around appliance dimensions that are less standard than people assume.
Full detail on laundry and mudroom→Garage and outdoor
Both of these sit in unconditioned Gulf Coast air all year, which changes the specification completely. Ordinary indoor casework does not survive either environment.
Garage cabinets
Storage for a space that sees the full 32.6 degree seasonal dew point swing with no air conditioning to flatten it. Material choice here is not a style question.
Full detail on garage cabinets→Outdoor kitchen cabinets
Outdoor cabinetry specified for 66 inches of rain a year and salt air, which rules out most of what works indoors and narrows the list to a handful of honest options.
Full detail on outdoor kitchen cabinets→Renewing what you already have
Three different services that people routinely confuse with each other. They are not interchangeable and they do not cost the same.
Cabinet refacing
New doors and drawer fronts plus a new veneer or laminate skin over the visible face frame. Boxes stay. Layout stays. Roughly the front third of a cabinet job.
Full detail on cabinet refacing→Painting and refinishing
The existing doors are stripped or scuff-sanded, prepped and sprayed with a catalysed finish. Nothing is replaced, so it is the cheapest of the three and the one most often done badly.
Full detail on painting and refinishing→Doors and drawer fronts only
New fronts on existing boxes without reskinning the face frame. It sits between refacing and painting, and it is the right answer when the frames are fine but the doors are not.
Full detail on doors and drawer fronts only→Fitting and hardware
The two services people buy last and notice first, because a perfectly built cabinet hung badly reads as a badly built cabinet.
Cabinet installation
Fitting cabinets you have already bought, including flat-pack and trade-supplied runs. Levelled to a laser line, screwed into framing, scribed to the walls.
Full detail on cabinet installation→Cabinet hardware
Hinges, slides, pulls and knobs, drilled from a jig. Soft close is a hardware specification rather than a door specification, and the two get confused constantly.
Full detail on cabinet hardware→How to choose between them without a showroom visit
Three questions settle almost every enquiry, and none of them requires anybody to come out first. Answering them honestly will usually tell you which of the fourteen pages above is the one you actually want.
One: are the boxes sound?
Open the doors. Press the sink base floor. Look at the shelf edges for sag and at the box corners for swelling or delamination. Pull a drawer right out and look at how the corners are joined. Sound boxes point at refacing, painting or new fronts. Failed boxes point at new cabinetry, and no amount of new door will change that, because a new door on a failed box is an expensive way to keep a failed box.
Two: is the layout the problem?
If the thing that irritates you daily is where the cabinets are rather than what they look like, every renewal service is the wrong answer. Refacing, painting and new fronts all keep the layout exactly as it is. Spending four figures to lock in a layout you dislike is the single most common regret in this trade, and it is entirely avoidable by asking the question before rather than after.
Three: does anything have to move?
A sink, a range, a dishwasher or a new island circuit changes the job from cabinetry into cabinetry plus trades, and it is where permits enter the picture. Mobile County Inspection Services lists installing new cabinetry as exempt work, and that exemption stops applying the moment plumbing or wiring moves. Knowing the answer to this question before you start collecting quotes is what stops a number moving by thousands halfway through.
What the fourteen services cost, in shape rather than in detail
The table below is a rough ordering rather than a quote, because a vanity and a whole kitchen sit in the same service category on every published dataset and therefore produce ranges too wide to be useful. Published national per linear foot installed figures are $500 to $1,400 and up for custom, $150 to $900 and up for semi-custom and $75 to $400 and up for stock, from Thumbtack's 8 July 2026 update, with HomeAdvisor's 17 June 2026 figures landing in the same territory. Installer labour is $50 to $70 per linear foot in the Thumbtack data.
| Group | Relative cost | Disruption | Other trades involved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kitchen cabinetry | Highest | High, the room is unusable | Plumbing, electrical, countertop, appliances |
| Bathrooms and storage | Middle | Low to moderate | Plumbing on vanities only |
| Garage and outdoor | Middle | Low | Electrical and gas on outdoor kitchens |
| Renewing what you have | Lowest | Low, days rather than weeks | None in most cases |
| Fitting and hardware | Lowest | Low | None |
Ordering is ours. The per linear foot figures behind it are published nationally by Thumbtack, 8 July 2026, and HomeAdvisor, 17 June 2026. No Mobile-specific cabinet pricing dataset is published by anybody.
The cost guide works through each published figure with its publisher and date attached, and explains why we will not print a Mobile-specific average that nobody has actually measured.
What we specify on every job, regardless of service
- Plywood at every sink base and in any cabinet against an exterior wall, because a wet particleboard floor is the most common cabinet failure in Mobile County.
- Box material named per location in the quote rather than per kitchen, so you can see where the money went.
- Door style and overlay stated as two separate decisions, because full overlay and inset are different prices for the same style.
- A named finish system, sprayed in a controlled space, not a brand of paint and a hope.
- Hinge and slide brand and type written down, since soft close is a hardware specification.
- A scribe and filler allowance shown as a visible line, because settled Mobile framing is never square.
- Cabinet-by-cabinet dimensions, so a second shop can quote the same scope and you can compare like with like.
- The Alabama Home Builders Licensure Board licence number on the paperwork for any job over $10,000.
The four specifications that apply across all fourteen
Whatever service you are looking at, four decisions recur, and they are the ones worth understanding once rather than relearning on each page.
Box material, chosen per location
Not per kitchen, per location. Plywood at every sink base, in any cabinet against an exterior wall, and anywhere a water line runs. MDF where a painted panel has to stay perfectly flat. Particleboard only in dry interior positions and only where budget genuinely requires it. A single kitchen routinely contains three different box materials, and a quote that names only one has not thought about it. The materials guide sets out the reasoning with the federal figures attached.
Door style and overlay, decided separately
Style is the face of the door: slab, shaker, recessed panel, raised panel, mullion or louvre. Overlay is how much of the face frame the door covers: full, partial or inset. They are independent decisions, they both move the price, and collapsing them into one is why two quotes for shaker cabinets can differ by thousands. Inset carries roughly a 20 percent markup over comparable traditional styles in HomeAdvisor's June 2026 data.
The finish system, named
Not a colour and not a brand of paint, but the system: what primer, what topcoat, sprayed or applied by hand, and in what environment. On this coast the environment part is not pedantry. Coatings cure by releasing solvent into the surrounding air, and air already carrying a 72 degree mean July dew point accepts less, which lengthens flash-off time between coats. A shop with a conditioned spray space works to the same schedule in August as in January.
Hardware, which is where soft close actually lives
Hinges, slides, pulls and knobs. Soft close comes from the hinge and the slide rather than from the door, which means it can be added to existing cabinets without replacing anything visible. Full extension undermount slides rather than three-quarter extension side-mount ones buy back roughly a quarter of every drawer's usable depth. Near the coast, solid stainless and solid brass outlast plated finishes, and that matters more for a slide than for a pull because a seized slide is a functional failure.
| Decision | Named on a good quote as | Common vague version |
|---|---|---|
| Box material | Plywood at sink base and exterior walls, MDF on painted panels | Wood |
| Door style and overlay | Shaker, full overlay | Shaker |
| Finish | Sprayed catalysed system, named primer and topcoat, conditioned booth | Painted |
| Hardware | Hinge and slide brand and type, soft close stated | Soft close included |
The right-hand column is what most quotes actually say. The left-hand column is what you can hold somebody to.
Sequencing a multi-room project
When more than one room is involved, the order is decided by disruption and by trade dependencies rather than by preference. Getting it wrong is how a household ends up without a kitchen and without a laundry in the same fortnight.
Kitchen first, almost always
The kitchen is the most disruptive room to lose and the one with the most dependencies: plumbing, electrical, countertop templating and appliance fitting all queue behind the cabinetry. It therefore wants the cleanest run at the schedule, with no other trade competing for the same days. It is also the room where a delay hurts most, which is an argument for starting it when nothing else is in the way.
Bathrooms next, because they share trades
Vanities involve the same plumber and often the same countertop fabricator, so following the kitchen with the bathrooms keeps both trades on site in one visit rather than two. The disruption is much lower: a bathroom out of action for a few days is an inconvenience, not a change in how the household eats.
Storage last, because none of it stops you living there
Built-ins, closets, laundry, mudroom and garage work can all happen around normal life. None of them removes a function from the house. That makes them the sensible tail of a larger project and also the sensible starting point for anybody who wants to see how a shop works before committing to a kitchen.
| Order | Room | Why it sits here | Other trades queued behind it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kitchen | Most disruptive, most dependencies | Plumbing, electrical, countertop, appliances |
| 2 | Bathrooms | Shares the plumber and fabricator with the kitchen | Plumbing, countertop |
| 3 | Laundry and mudroom | Lower disruption, may share plumbing | Plumbing only if a sink is added |
| 4 | Built-ins and closets | No trade dependencies at all | None |
| 5 | Garage and outdoor | Independent of the house's daily function | Electrical and gas on outdoor kitchens |
Ordering by disruption and trade dependency. A project with only one room obviously ignores all of this.
What a single shop across a house actually buys you
There is a real argument for keeping cabinet work with one shop across several rooms, and it is not simply convenience. Four things get easier, and the first one is close to impossible to achieve any other way.
- Species, stain formula, door profile, overlay and hardware match across every room, which is difficult when a kitchen firm, a closet franchise and a handyman each do their own piece.
- One measure visit, one drawing set, one finishing run and one installation mobilisation instead of three or four of each.
- The finishing happens in the same batch, which matters more than people expect on stained work, because stain varies between batches of the same formula.
- One party is responsible when something needs adjusting, rather than three parties each pointing at the other two.
The counter-argument is real too: a shop that is excellent at kitchens is not automatically excellent at closet systems, and a single supplier removes the pressure that competing quotes create. The honest position is that matching matters most where rooms are visible from each other, and matters very little between a kitchen and a garage.
What is not on this list
Worth saying plainly, because a services page that implies it covers everything is a services page that will disappoint somebody.
Countertops are not cabinetry. They are templated off the installed cabinets by a stone fabricator, they arrive as a separate line on any honest quote, and the sequencing is fixed: cabinets are installed and levelled first, then the countertop is templated. Appliances, splashbacks, flooring, plumbing and electrical work are all separate trades too. Plumbing and electrical are also the point at which Mobile County's cabinetry permit exemption stops applying.
We also do not carry out structural work. If a wall is coming out to open a kitchen up, that is a different trade with a different permit path, and it has to happen before anything is measured, because the room after the wall comes out is a different room from the one before.
Where these services are available
All fourteen are available across Mobile County and Baldwin County. That covers Mobile itself and Saraland to the north on US 43, then across the bay to Spanish Fort, Daphne and Fairhope on the Eastern Shore, and down to Gulf Shores on the coast. Mobile had 187,041 residents at the 2020 census and Baldwin County 231,767, with the combined statistical area reaching 661,964, and the housing stock at either end of that is different enough that the advice genuinely changes.
See the service area page for the whole footprint, or go straight to Daphne, Fairhope, Spanish Fort, Saraland or Gulf Shores. A measured quote starts on the contact page.