McDaniels Kitchen & Bath

We continued our monthly Partners in Design event series in August with a visit from Bob Matthiesen of Pop-ity Popcorn Co. This monthly event series offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity to bring a range of local businesses...

For most kitchens, a stock or semi-custom cabinet line is the right answer. Stock boxes are built around three fixed numbers, and in a room with square walls and an eight-foot ceiling those numbers work fine. A custom kitchen earns its cost somewhere else, when the room refuses one of them. A work surface that has to sit below 36 inches. A walkway that can’t spare 24 inches o...

Custom countertops get measured after your cabinets are installed, not before. Fabrication then typically runs one to three weeks in a shop, and install day itself is a few hours. You lose the kitchen sink for the stretch in between, which is the part most people fail to plan around. Price tracks square footage, material, edge profile, and how many cutouts the slab needs.

Keep upper cabinets on the wall you cook against. Give open shelving the wall you don’t.

That holds for most kitchens. Closed doors earn their space around the range and the sink, where splatter and daily dish traffic land. Open shelves earn theirs on a coffee wall, a breakfast nook, or the run beside a window where a cabinet box would eat the daylight. Most people ...

Butcher block earns its place on an island. Put that same wood around a sink and it becomes the first surface in the kitchen to fail.

That’s the answer most homeowners never get. Wood counters aren’t a whole-kitchen material, and they aren’t a mistake either — they’re a zone decision. The warmth people want from butcher block holds up beautifully on a prep run, a ba...