Assembling Kaboodle cabinets is relatively straight forward. The instructions are clear and the predrilled holes are well placed. If you have a general sense of how things should go together you wont have too much trouble.
Having a second person to hold things and help turn cabinets over is advised. All you need is an electric screw driver and drill. The drill is required when joining cabinets together, fixing cabinets to the walls, and installing the draw runners, draw fronts and end pannels. You will need some drill bits ranging from 2mm to 4mm, and a countersink bit.
The cabinets are will packed, though I would have preferred they used cardboard spacer packing rather than polystyrene.
All the cabinets are screwed to each other and to the walls (drill your own holes).
Fo us, levelling the cabinets was easy. The cabinet feet are in 3 parts – a cup that is screwed to the base of the cabinet, a leg piece that is push fit into the cup, and then a foot that is screwed into the leg an is thus adjustable. We eliminated the foot piece altogether for two reasons. Firstly, we have a soffit overhead and by eliminating the foot we can just squeeze in the cabinets, benches and wall cabinets that sit on the benches, with about 10-15mm to spare. Also we wanted lower bench heights because one of our family members is quite short, so a lower bench height is more comfortable. Because the kitchen sub floor is quit flat and level, eliminating the adjustable foot meant that the cabinets were level by default. It just worked out that way. What it does mean though is that I have to rip down the kick rail to fit – quite simple on my table saw.
Small problems with Kaboodle details
Nothing is perfect, and I will list out some of the issues I have found with Kaboodle.
Scratches on doors
We got the vinyl wrap doors, with the heritage profile. The backs of some of the doors have minor scratches. Though not a huge issue, ist a little annoying. I suspect its a packaging and handling issue in the factory.
Stickers don’t come off easily
The backs of the doors have stickers on them. They are a pain in the but to get off. Its obvious that you will want to take them off, so they should use a less aggressive adhesive.
Hinge screw hole inserts don’t grip well
For the euro hinges, there are predrilled holes in both the doors and cabinets. These holes have little plastic inserts in them. I suspect their purpose is to help prevent the small screws from stripping in the MDF and chipboard. The problem is that the screws dont grip in the inserts very well either.
Many of the screws slipped in the inserts. So we have resorted to winding the screws with plumbers teflon tape first, and this is proving to work quite well.
Corner cupboard doors sag a bit too much
There is a bit of weight in a two part corner cupboard door, so the primary door has 3 hinges, which is good. However I have not been able to adjust the hinges well enough to prevent the secondary door from sagging a little. I would prefer to use Hettich hinges on these doors, as I have done on the normal doors. However Kaboodle does not sell Hettich hinges for corner cupboards – go figure. This is an oversight on their part.
You can see in the above picture that the bottom of the secondary door does not line up very well with the cupboard.