Hi,
I've been planning for years to make kitchen cabinets for my house. But, reality is setting in. My back and arms are saying "are you kidding?". My wife's almost infinite patience is dissipating and showing that "almost" does apply. So, I'm capitulating to reality and buying custom-built cabinets.
I'm in the process of designing the cabinets, along with the cabinet maker's in-house designer. They will be face frame cabinets with inset doors and drawers, cherry with natural finish. Face frame, doors and drawer fronts will be Mission style. The kitchen is U-shaped with a soffit over all the cabinets. The top of the wall cabinets will butt against the bottom of the soffit, as much as the "out-of-level" soffit will allow. That brings me to my primary question. How to handle to gap between the bottom of the soffit and the top of the wall cabinets?
The soffit is a maximum of 3/4" out-of-level along the run of wall cabinets. I don't want the heavy look of a built up crown type moulding along the top of the wall cabinets. I was thinking about installing a simple small moulding to cover the gap above the cabinets. I'm leaning towards either a simple plain strip (Maybe 1-2" high and 3/8 - 1/2" deep) in keeping with the Mission style or a small shoe or cove moulding. I'm open to any and all suggestions on how to deal with this situation.
The designer has proposed a top rail for the face-frame of the wall cabinets which is 1 1/4" high. My concern is that such a narrow rail will highlight the out-of-level situation, regardless of the type of moulding I decide to use. If I choose the simple small moulding I described above with, say, a 1" high x 3/8" deep plain strip, then at the low point of the soffit 1/4" of the top rail would be visible below the moulding compared to 1" at the high point of the soffit. I suspect that would look pretty bad. I'm considering two possibilities to reduce the visible impact of this out-of-level. First, increase the height of the top rail to, say, 3". This would increase the visible top rail below the moulding to 2 1/4" at the soffit low point and 3" at the soffit high point. I'm guessing this would de-emphasize the visible impact of the out-of-level compared to 1 1/4" high top rail design.
Second, the soffit bottoms are relatively flat, just out-of-level (sloping either upwards or downwards). So, I could taper the moulding strip height so that about half of the out-of-level is seen on the top rail exposure and the other half on the height of the molding strip. I haven't explained this very well. I'll try to give an example. If a 3" high top rail is used and a 1 1/2 high simple moulding strip, then the moulding strip would taper from 1 1/2" high at the high point of the soffit to 1 1/8" high at the low point of the soffit. This would split the visible impact of the 3/4" out-of-level with half on the moulding strip itself and half on the visible height of the top rail. I'm not sure whether this approach of tapering the height of the moulding strip would be effective for de-emphasizing the visible impact of the out-of-level.
Again, any and all suggestions are welcome.
I can play around with different options for the moulding once I install the cabinets. But, for now, I do need to finalize the height of the top rail.
Thanks.
Bob