Can you hang new cabinets on old walls?

What actually holds a cabinet up

Wall cabinets get loaded with dishes, glasses and canned goods. That weight has to go into the wood framing inside the wall, the studs. Sheetrock or plaster alone won’t hold it, no matter what kind of anchor you use. So the first question with any old wall isn’t how it looks. It’s where the studs are and whether they’re solid.

In most Long Island houses from the 1960s on, walls are sheetrock over wood studs, and hanging new cabinets is straightforward. In older houses, and some older capes and farmhouses out east, you may have plaster over wood lath, which is thicker and harder, and the studs aren’t always where you’d expect.

What we check when the old cabinets come off

Taking down old cabinets tells you a lot about the wall behind them:

• Stud location. We find and mark every stud. If the new cabinet layout puts a cabinet edge between studs, we add blocking.
• Flatness. Old walls bow in and out. Cabinets hung on a bowed wall rock, and the doors won’t line up.
• Level and plumb. Floors and ceilings in older houses are rarely level. We set the cabinets to a level line, not to the floor or ceiling.
• Damage. Torn paper on sheetrock, big holes from old screws, crumbling plaster, or water damage behind a sink.
• What’s in the wall. Pipes and wires where you’d want to drive a screw.

Common fixes before new cabinets go up

Blocking

If the studs don’t line up with the new cabinets, we can open the wall and add horizontal blocking, pieces of wood between the studs, at the height the cabinets will hang. Then we close it back up with sheetrock. It gives a solid screw line anywhere along the run.

Shimming

Where the wall dips, we slide thin shims behind the cabinet at the screw points so the cabinet hangs flat instead of bending to follow the wall. It’s the step that makes a run of cabinets look straight, with doors that line up.

Patching or new sheetrock

Small damage gets patched. If the wall is badly torn up, or you’re changing the layout, it’s often cleaner to put up new sheetrock on that wall. That also helps if the area behind a range or sink had moisture problems.

Plaster walls

Plaster can crack when you drive screws through it. We pre-drill and use longer screws to reach the studs through the thicker wall. If the plaster is loose from the lath, we either secure it or cut it out and replace that section.

What about an uneven floor?

Base cabinets sit on the floor, but they still need to be level across the top so the countertop sits flat. In older kitchens, the floor might drop noticeably from one end to the other. We shim the base cabinets up to a level line, then cover any gap at the floor with trim. The wall cabinets are set off that same line, so everything lines up.

Other things to plan for

• New cabinets may not match the old footprint, which can leave unpainted wall or old flooring showing.
• Moving a sink, range or outlet may need a plumber or electrician, which we’ll talk through with you.
• If you’re adding a tile backsplash, the wall behind it needs to be flat and sound too.

Tall cabinets and heavy loads

Pantry cabinets and other tall units get anchored at the top so they can’t tip forward. Cabinets that will hold heavy things, like a microwave, stacks of plates or cookbooks, need extra care with how they’re fastened. We plan the screw locations for those spots ahead of time and add blocking where the studs fall short.

Bottom line

Old walls are rarely a reason you can’t have new cabinets. They’re a reason to check the wall carefully and do a little prep so the cabinets hang flat, level and secure. We look at all of this before giving you a written price, so the wall work isn’t a surprise halfway through.

See how we hang and level cabinets on our cabinet installation page, or call 631-745-9982.