09/04/2026
Your floors aren't always level.
Your cabinets still need to be. ๐
Especially in older homes, it's pretty common for floors to have some slope or variation. And while you might not notice it walking through the room, it matters quite a bit when you're installing cabinets and countertops.
If the cabinets aren't level, everything that comes after them can be affected - countertops, doors, drawers, appliances and how everything lines up across the room.
So what do we do when the floor isn't level?
There are a couple of options.
One is using self-leveler to create a level surface across the floor.
Another, and sometimes more cost-effective, option is to level the cabinets themselves using shims.
That's what you're seeing here. ๐
The shims allow us to get the cabinets level even when the floor underneath them isn't. They'll eventually be trimmed, and the baseboard will cover everything you're seeing at the bottom.
But there's also a point where an unlevel floor becomes more than a cabinet-installation problem.
If a floor is significantly out of level, enough that it would require a substantial amount of self-leveler to correct, we need to look at ๐๐ต๐.
In some cases, adjustments may need to be made to the structure underneath the floor, whether that's in a basement or crawl space. There could also be a larger structural issue that needs to be addressed before we're thinking about setting cabinets at all.
It's a good example of something we run into pretty often in remodeling:
Sometimes the solution is a few shims.
Sometimes what you can see is telling us we need to take a closer look at what you can't. ๐
