20 questions, drawn from Google Autocomplete data captured for cabinet searches on 30 September 2026 and from the regulatory sources that govern this trade in Alabama. If yours is not here, ask it directly.
How much do custom cabinets cost in Mobile, AL?
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.
What does a whole kitchen of cabinets cost?
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.
Are custom cabinets worth it, or should I buy stock?
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.
What wood is best for cabinets in Mobile Bay humidity?
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.
Why does Mobile need a different moisture spec from the rest of the country?
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.
How long do custom cabinets take to make?
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.
Do I need a permit to install new cabinets in Mobile County?
Mobile County Inspection Services lists installing new cabinetry as work that does not require a permit. Their permits page says almost any work in Mobile County requires a permit, then names the exceptions, which include painting, redecorating, changing countertops, installing new cabinetry, replacing light fixtures and ceiling fans, and replacing equipment that needs no rewiring. The moment the job moves a sink, adds a circuit or relocates a gas line, you are outside that exemption and into plumbing, electrical or mechanical permits, and city limits have their own departments. Confirm before work starts.
Does a cabinet installer in Alabama need a licence?
Yes, once the cost of the job passes $10,000. Alabama law defines a residential home builder as somebody who undertakes construction, repair, improvement or reimprovement of a residence for compensation when the cost of the undertaking exceeds ten thousand dollars, and the Home Builders Licensure Board requires all residential home builders to be licensed annually. Cost of the undertaking is defined as the total cost of materials, labour, supervision, overhead and profit, so a $9,000 cabinet package with $2,000 of installation is a licensed job. Working without that licence is a Class A misdemeanour.
Is cabinet refacing cheaper than replacing?
Refacing is cheaper, but only when the existing boxes deserve to stay. Refacing keeps the carcasses and replaces doors, drawer fronts and the visible face frame skin, so you pay for roughly the front third of a cabinet job. It stops making sense the moment the boxes have soft bottoms, delaminated particleboard, sagging shelves or a layout you actually dislike, because refacing changes the face and nothing else. In coastal Mobile County, a sink base that has been wet is the single most common reason a reface quote turns into a replacement quote.
What is the difference between custom, semi-custom and stock cabinets?
The difference is who chooses the dimensions. Stock is built to fixed widths in 3 inch increments and shipped from inventory, semi-custom starts from a manufacturer's catalogue and allows modifications to depth, height and finish within their rules, and custom is drawn to your room with no catalogue involved. HomeAdvisor's installed ranges track that hierarchy: $100 to $300 per linear foot for stock, $150 to $650 for semi-custom and $500 to $1,200 for custom, with per unit figures of $200 to $650, $250 to $800 and $500 upward.
Are painted or stained cabinets more durable?
Stain holds up better to seasonal wood movement, and paint holds up better to grease and wiping. A painted door is a rigid film sitting across a five-piece frame, so when the panel shrinks in a dry January the paint line at the panel edge shows as a hairline. Stain moves with the wood and hides that line completely. On the other hand a catalysed painted finish wipes clean in a way an open-grain stained oak door never will. In a Mobile kitchen, where the mean dew point swings 32.6 degrees between January and July, that shrink line is not a defect, it is physics.
How much does cabinet installation cost on its own?
Thumbtack puts the cabinet installer labour rate at $50 to $70 per linear foot, updated 8 July 2026. Their worked example of a typical kitchen comes to about $5,000 in total, made up of roughly $900 of installation on top of roughly $4,000 of cabinets, and their national average range for a cabinet installation job is $482 to $2,167 with a most common figure of $1,044. Removal of the old cabinets is usually a separate line, around $300. Homewyse is worth reading alongside that for one reason: it states plainly that installed figures exclude general contractor overhead of 13 to 22 percent, permits, and any modification to existing plumbing, electrical or mechanical systems.
What are custom cabinets actually made of?
A custom cabinet is normally a plywood or MDF box, a hardwood face frame if it is framed construction, and solid hardwood or veneered door and drawer fronts. Plywood boxes cost more and survive a wet sink base, MDF is flatter and takes paint better, and particleboard is the cheapest and the first to fail when water finds it. On the Gulf Coast the specification that matters most is plywood at every sink base and in any cabinet against an exterior wall, regardless of what the rest of the kitchen uses.
Are IKEA or RTA cabinets the same as custom?
No. Ready-to-assemble and IKEA cabinets are stock cabinets in flat-pack form, sold in fixed widths with a fixed set of fronts. They can produce a very good kitchen when the room suits standard sizes, and they are a genuinely sensible choice for a rental or a tight budget. They cannot solve an out-of-square wall, an unusual ceiling height or a run that needs to finish exactly at a window casing, which is the entire reason custom cabinetry exists.
What cabinet door styles are there?
The practical list is slab, shaker, recessed panel, raised panel, mullion or glass, and louvre. Slab is a single flat face, shaker is a flat panel inside a square-edged frame, recessed panel adds profiled inner edges, raised panel adds a shaped centre panel, mullion swaps the panel for glass behind a grid, and louvre uses angled slats. Separately from style, every door is either full overlay, partial overlay or inset, which is about how much of the face frame the door covers, and inset costs more everywhere because the reveal has to stay even.
Where should cabinet hardware go?
The conventional placement is pulls centred on the bottom rail of upper doors and the top rail of lower doors, aligned vertically with the door stile, and drawer pulls centred on the drawer face or centred in the upper third of a tall drawer. There is no code and no wrong answer, only consistency, so the one rule worth keeping is that every pull in a run should be set out from the same reference edge rather than measured by eye. A drilling jig is what separates a tidy run from a wavy one.
Do you charge for a quote?
No. The quote is free, it is written, and it is produced after somebody has measured the room rather than from a photograph. It lists cabinet-by-cabinet dimensions, the box material in each location, the door style and finish, the hardware, and the scribe and filler allowances, so you can hand the same document to a second shop and get a genuinely comparable number back.
Which areas around Mobile do you cover?
Mobile and the rest of Mobile County, plus the Eastern Shore and the coast in Baldwin County. That means Mobile itself, Saraland to the north on US 43, and across the Bayway to Spanish Fort, Daphne and Fairhope, with Gulf Shores covered on the coast. Mobile County and Baldwin County between them hold well over 600,000 people in the Mobile, Daphne and Fairhope combined statistical area, and the cabinet requirements at either end of that are genuinely different.
Can you match cabinets to an existing run?
Usually yes on new construction, and honestly sometimes no on older stained wood. A shop can match a profile, a species and a stain formula, but an oak door that has been sitting in a Mobile kitchen for twenty years has ambered in a way no fresh finish will replicate on day one. The usual answer is to match the profile exactly, accept a visible difference for the first year or two, and let the new work catch up, or to refinish the old and the new together so they start from the same point.
What should a cabinet quote include before I sign it?
A cabinet quote should name the box material per location, the door style and overlay, the finish system, the hinge and slide brand, the hardware allowance, the scribe and filler allowance, and the builder licence number. If the box material is described only as wood, or the finish only as painted, there is nothing in the document to hold anybody to. Alabama's Home Builders Licensure Board publishes a licence register, so a licence number on the paperwork is a thirty second check before you sign anything.
