If you were absent when your contractor installed the kitchen cabinetry, you might not be aware of the strategy or technique he/she used to secure the cabinets in place.
Was it gum, or was it something else?
Are cabinets glued to the wall?
Cabinets are rarely ever glued to the wall, except when an extra means of stability is required in which case the back panel of the cabinet can be glued in addition to securing it with nails or attaching it onto a french cleat. The most common way of securing cabinets onto walls is actually by driving specialty nails into the back panel that goes into studs in the wall.
How Are Kitchen Cabinets Kept In Place?
There are many techniques used to hold kitchen cabinets on the wall.
Sometimes, only one technique is used, and other times, it’s a combination of two or more techniques, for instance, when installing a cabinet on a weak wall, or wall area with no studs, that has no studs, you might have to secure the cabinets with a toggle bolt, wall anchor combined with screw or even use glue in order to secure it firmly in place.
Let’s quickly go through each one of these techniques so that you know how your cabinets aren’t fixed onto the wall.
Cabinets back are attached to the wall using a specialty screw
The most common way of securing cabinets to a wall is using screws. Strategic spots on the back of the walls (areas with wood or metal studs) are marked with a pencil and nails are driven from the corresponding area of the cabinet’s back panel into the marked area behind using a power screw.
The nails used for these projects typically have a sturdy construction. They are typically long and are designed to have an aggressive threading to better attach to the wall and hold the cabinet firmly in place.
They also have round heads with a washer to distribute the load of the fastener and make for an effective fastening.
Cabinets are glued onto walls
It’s actually very difficult nowadays to find cabinets that are fixed onto the wall using only glue.
This is because the cabinetry is one part of the kitchen that can be replaced, or changed, and as a result, must not be fixed using techniques that can cause damage to the wall or even the cabinet when the time for detachment dawns.
Typically, you’ll find cabinets attached to walls using glue when the wall question is weak and therefore needs extra technique to be able to secure the cabinets properly in place.
Cabinet that are heavy from construction too might also need to be glued in order to properly secure them in place.
How do you remove kitchen cabinets that are glued together or to the wall?
If you have cabinets that are glued together, then removing them is not really a difficult task. All you need is something that can dissolve the bond between these two surfaces and you’re good to go. Typically you can use acetone or a liquid thinner like luck with dinner, but you have to be very careful and actually wearing clothes and protection to protect yourself.
French cleat
One not very popular technique for hanging cabinets on walls is using a french cleat.
French cleats are made by cutting a scrap of plywood in the middle at 45 °, so the strip splits in two with each half bearing a 45° angle.
One half is installed on the wall in an appropriate position using screws and the other half is installed on the back of the cabinet.
The two halves are then clicked together to form a whole thereby keeping the cabinet firmly in place.
In order to make sure that there isn’t an offset at the back of the cabinet as it sits against the wall, you can plan ahead and design the cabinet such that there is an inset of the back panel exactly the depth of the cleat you’re installing.
Then position the cleat at the back of the panel to complete the flush. This way, the cabinet sits on the wall in a plane fashion without tilt.
Because the method would actually require sacrifice of a lot of space inside the cabinet, you can choose to go with the next technique here.
Create a normal flush back panel, then install the french cleat at the top to the back panel. Now install a plywood of matching depth to that of the cleat at the base of the panel. This would balance out the offset initially created by the cleat.
Now proceed to hang the cabinet on the other half cleat already installed on the wall.
French cleats are a great way to minimize damage to walls caused by driving nails or using glues. And they make for cabinets that can be easily detached during remodelling.
Screw to hold the face frames
Screwing nails into the back panel of cabinets does a perfect job at holding them squarely in place.
But for additional support as well as to eliminate gaps between cabinets, that can drop down the aesthetic value of a kitchen, cabinets are also held in place using their face frames.
So for any center cabinet, it has part of its face frame that aligns with the face frame of an adjacent cabinet on both sides.
So screws are driven from one side of the face frame into the other to give the joinery a cleaner look.
Screw to the flooring in the case of an island
In cases like the kitchen island, the main way in which they are secured in place is by driving screws from the base of the cabinet into wooden studs installed on the flooring.
How do you separate two cabinets?
It may have wandered into your head at one time on how to actually separate any two cabinets from your cabinetry.
Doing so is actually not that hard as cabinets these days aren’t made to be permanent fixtures, but rather, temporary since modern kitchens nowadays have possibilities to be remodeled.
So let’s talk about the upper cabinets. When you have a cabinet installed on the upper section of your wall, you can easily detach it from the wall by unscrewing the nails that hold it in place at the back panel, and then if it’s a center cabinet, unscrew the nails in the face frame that hold it together with adjacent cabinets.
When you’re done unscrewing every binding nail there is, the cabinets should come right off with no issues.
Before you embark on this project however, make sure to remove every single item from inside the cabinet in order to make the removal process easier.
Now over to the base cabinets.
So if you have a base cabinet and especially one that is sandwiched between two cabinets, you would still do the same thing like you did with the upper cabinets, then remove the screw on the foldable plate that attaches the cabinet to the countertop.
Afterwards, pull gently on the cabinet and it should slide right off.
We have actually written an extensive article on how to remove a single cabinet from a cabinetry and replace it. You can check that article for more details.