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Kitchen with light hardwood flooring, cream cabinets, a central island with bar stools and stainless appliances
Two Ways To Build The Same Kitchen
There are only two real options and both are legitimate. Flooring goes down first across the whole room and the cabinets are set on top of it, or the cabinets go in first and the flooring is cut to fit neatly around them, meeting the toe kick.
Walk into two finished kitchens built either way and you will struggle to tell them apart. The difference only reveals itself later, when something needs replacing, and by then the decision is locked in. That is what makes this worth five minutes of thought at the planning stage rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be on site first.
What Each Approach Actually Costs You Later
Running the floor underneath gives you a continuous surface with no cut line to disguise, and everything sits at a consistent height. The trade is that the cabinets are now sitting on the floor, pinning it down. Replacing that floor means removing or at minimum lifting the cabinets, which turns a flooring job into a kitchen job. You also pay for material that spends its life hidden under cabinet boxes.
Running the floor around uses less material and leaves the cabinets independent, so a future floor replacement stays a flooring job. The trade is a cut line at the toe kick that needs doing well, usually finished with a shoe moulding, and a kitchen that is harder to reconfigure. Move an island or change a cabinet run later and you are left with bare patches where the old footprint was, with no matching material to fill them.
The Detail That Decides It For You
For a lot of homes the choice is not really a preference at all, because the flooring type settles it. Glue down and nail down floors, including tile and most traditional hardwood installations, are bonded or fastened to the substrate and have no problem carrying cabinets on top.
Floating floors behave differently. A floating floor is not attached to anything underneath and is designed to expand and contract as a single sheet with humidity. Put heavy fixed cabinets on top of it and you have pinned a floor that needs to move. The movement has to go somewhere, which usually means peaking or buckling further out in the run. For floating installations, running the floor around the cabinets is frequently the correct call rather than a cost saving one, and any installer should raise that with you unprompted.
The Dishwasher Bay Deserves Its Own Decision
This is the detail that catches the most people out, and it is worth treating separately from the cabinet question entirely. Whichever approach you take around the cabinets, the flooring should generally run into the dishwasher bay rather than stopping at the front edge of it.
If it stops at the front, the dishwasher ends up sitting on the old subfloor while the finished floor in front of it sits higher. The appliance went in before the floor, so it came in at the lower level without any trouble. Getting it back out means lifting it over a lip that did not exist on install day, and plenty of people discover this when a dishwasher fails and the only ways forward are cutting the floor or shaving the appliance feet. Range slides and refrigerator bays are worth the same consideration for the same reason.
Neither Choice Is The Wrong One
It would be easy to read this and conclude one method is correct. It is not that simple, and anyone insisting otherwise is not giving you the full picture. Under is the stronger choice if you expect the kitchen layout to stay put and you want a continuous surface with no transition to manage. Around is the stronger choice if you may change the floor before you change the cabinets, or if your flooring type needs room to move.
What matters is that it was a decision rather than a default. Ask which approach is being used, ask why, and ask specifically what happens at the appliance bays. Those three questions take a minute at the quote stage and they are the difference between a kitchen that is easy to work on in ten years and one that is not.
Plan The Sequence With Us
At Dungan's Floors, we work through this with you before anything is ordered, because the right answer depends on your layout, your cabinets and the floor you have chosen rather than on a standard approach applied to every job. Whether you are looking at hardwood or tile, we will talk you through how it should meet your cabinets. We serve homeowners throughout Mckinney, TX, Allen, TX, Plano, TX, Princeton, TX, Prosper, TX, and Celina, TX from our showrooms at McKinney, TX. Contact us to get the sequence right the first time.
