What a kitchen cabinet job in Mobile, AL includes
A kitchen cabinet job covers the base cabinets, the wall cabinets, any tall units such as pantries and oven housings, the appliance surrounds, the toe kicks, the crown or ceiling trim, the fillers and scribes, and the hardware. It does not normally include the countertop, the backsplash, the appliances or any plumbing and electrical work, and the clearest quotes say so explicitly rather than leaving you to discover it.
In a Mobile house the specification splits further than most people expect. A single kitchen usually contains three different box materials: plywood at the sink base and along any exterior wall, MDF where a painted panel has to stay dead flat, and whichever of the two suits the budget everywhere else. That is not over-engineering. It is a response to the fact that the USDA Forest Products Laboratory recommends an 11 percent in-service moisture content for interior woodwork in the damp, warm coastal area against 8 percent across most of the country, and that a slow leak under a sink in that environment goes unnoticed for months.
Layout first, cabinets second
The three appliances set everything. Sink, range and refrigerator positions determine where the plumbing, the vent and the dedicated circuits are, and every cabinet is arranged around them. Moving any one of the three is the decision that moves the budget most, because it pulls in a plumber, an electrician or both and it is the point at which Mobile County's cabinetry permit exemption stops applying.
The clearances worth knowing before you draw anything
Standard base cabinet depth is 24 inches and standard counter height is 36 inches, which makes a 25 to 25 and a half inch countertop with overhang the usual result. Wall cabinets are normally 12 inches deep and hung with 18 inches of clearance above the counter, which is where a standing person's forearm and a stand mixer both fit. Tall pantry and oven housings run 84, 90 or 96 inches depending on ceiling height. None of that is a rule you must follow, but every departure from it needs a reason, because appliances, splashbacks and the human body were all designed around those numbers.
Where custom earns its money in an older Mobile kitchen
Take a tape to your longest wall and measure it at the floor, at counter height and near the ceiling. In Mobile's older neighbourhoods, streets of raised cottages and bungalows that have settled for a century, been re-levelled and been through more than one storm, those three numbers frequently disagree by half an inch or more. Stock cabinets, which arrive in fixed 3 inch increments, cannot absorb that. The installer absorbs it with filler strips instead, and a filler strip wider than about two inches reads immediately as a compromise.
Custom cabinetry absorbs it in the cabinet width. A 26 and a half inch drawer bank exists if you want one. So does a 41 inch sink base under a window that is not centred on the wall. The custom cabinets page goes through the full build sequence, and the tier comparison guide gives you a filler strip test you can run yourself this afternoon.
Box, frame, door and drawer, decided separately
The box
Plywood boxes cost more than particleboard and survive water. Particleboard is flat, cheap and swells irreversibly once wet, which is why every honest specification on this coast puts plywood at the sink base regardless of what the rest of the kitchen uses. MDF sits between the two: denser and flatter than plywood, better under paint, and no better than particleboard when water finds it.
Framed or frameless
Framed construction adds a hardwood face frame to the front of the box, which stiffens it and gives hinges a solid landing. Frameless, sometimes called full access, hangs the door straight off the box side and gains roughly 10 percent usable volume with a cleaner interior. HomeAdvisor prices frameless at roughly a 15 percent premium over framed nationally. In a house with leaning walls, framed is marginally more forgiving because the frame gives a scribe something to cut into.
Doors
Style and overlay are separate decisions. Style is slab, shaker, recessed panel, raised panel, mullion or louvre. Overlay is full, partial or inset and describes how much face frame the door covers. HomeAdvisor puts inset at roughly a 20 percent markup over comparable traditional styles, and on this coast inset also demands more care over species, because an inset door lives in a fixed opening with an even reveal and the reveal is exactly what changes when the panel moves. The door styles guide covers all six.
Drawers
Dovetailed or doweled solid wood or good plywood, on full extension undermount slides. The alternative, stapled butt-jointed boxes on side-mount epoxy slides, fails in a predictable place: the front separates from the box on the deep drawer under the cooktop that holds the cast iron. Drawer construction is worth naming in the quote because it is invisible in a showroom and obvious after three years.
What kitchen cabinets cost in Mobile, AL
The published national installed ranges are $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, from Thumbtack's 8 July 2026 update. HomeAdvisor's 17 June 2026 figures put custom at $500 to $1,200, semi-custom at $150 to $650 and stock at $100 to $300, which is close enough that the two datasets corroborate each other. Cabinet installer labour on its own is $50 to $70 per linear foot in the Thumbtack data.
| Kitchen | Linear feet | Semi-custom at $150 to $650 | Custom at $500 to $1,200 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small galley | 15 ft | $2,250 to $9,750 | $7,500 to $18,000 |
| Typical L-shape | 25 ft | $3,750 to $16,250 | $12,500 to $30,000 |
| U-shape with peninsula | 30 ft | $4,500 to $19,500 | $15,000 to $36,000 |
| Large kitchen with island | 40 ft | $6,000 to $26,000 | $20,000 to $48,000 |
Our arithmetic against HomeAdvisor's published national per linear foot ranges, 17 June 2026. These are national figures. There is no published Mobile-specific cabinet pricing dataset.
Full detail, by tier, by material and by room size, is in the cost guide.
The Gulf Coast specification, in one section
Wood Handbook FPL-GTR-282, Table 13-2, sets the recommended in-service moisture content for interior woodwork at 8 percent in most of the United States, 6 percent in the dry south-west, and 11 percent in the damp, warm coastal area, with individual pieces running 8 to 13 percent. Mobile sits inside that coastal band on the Handbook's own map. Cabinet stock is kiln dried to 6 to 8 percent, so a kitchen delivered here is gaining moisture from day one.
NOAA's 1991 to 2020 normals for Mobile Regional Airport give the driver: a mean dew point of 72.0 degrees on 15 July against 39.4 degrees on 15 January, and 66.15 inches of rain a year. Air conditioning flattens the indoor swing considerably, which is why the Forest Products Laboratory is careful to note that its recommended figures assume buildings without air conditioning and that conditioned buildings depend on the equipment being correctly sized.
In practice that produces four decisions, all of them cheap at build time and impossible afterwards: plywood at wet locations, lower-movement species where a panel must be wide, end grain sealed as thoroughly as faces, and reveals set with the season in mind. The materials guide quotes the federal tables in full.
What to check before you sign a kitchen quote
- Wall-by-wall elevations with every cabinet numbered and dimensioned, not a lump sum.
- Box material named per location, with plywood explicitly at the sink base and exterior walls.
- Door style and overlay listed separately, since shaker full overlay and shaker inset are different prices.
- Drawer box construction and slide type named, because soft close is a hardware line and not a door line.
- The finish system named, and where it is being sprayed.
- A scribe and filler allowance shown as a visible line item.
- What is excluded: countertop, backsplash, appliances, plumbing and electrical, stated in writing.
- The Alabama Home Builders Licensure Board licence number, required on residential work over $10,000.
Kitchen cabinets across Mobile County and the Eastern Shore
Mobile's older housing stock and Saraland's mix of mid-century and newer construction produce the rooms that need scribing and out-of-square allowances. Across the bay, Daphne, Fairhope and Spanish Fort have grown between 46 and 48 percent since 2010, so much of the work there sits in houses built square, where the interesting question is layout rather than geometry. Gulf Shores brings condominium kitchens, where the building's rules and the service lift shape the job as much as the walls do.
Details for each: Daphne, Fairhope, Spanish Fort, Saraland, Gulf Shores, or the whole service area. Start a measured quote on the contact page.