Should the soffit come out when the kitchen cabinets are replaced?
Often, yes, when the box proves to be empty or holds something that can be rerouted, and that gets found out before the shop draws a single upper. The shops that build custom kitchen cabinets in Owensboro want it settled at the measure, since removing the soffit changes the size and the number of the upper boxes as well as the ceiling.
In the brick-ranch galleys of Wesleyan Heights and Hillcrest the soffit is usually original to the house, framed in when the kitchen was built and painted along with the walls ever since. Many of those kitchens still have it. Some owners like the low line it gives the room. Others have wanted it gone for years and assumed it was holding something up.
A soffit is normally light framing hung from the ceiling joists, and it carries no load. What can tie it down is whatever runs through it.
What is a kitchen soffit usually hiding?
Sometimes nothing. A lot of kitchen soffits are framing and drywall that closed the space above uppers that stopped short of the ceiling, the way cabinets were hung when the house went up. Others carry something the house still uses, and one soffit can hold different things along its length. The possibilities worth expecting:
- a heating and cooling duct on its way to a register across the room
- a vent pipe or a drain from a bathroom on the other side of the wall
- wiring for the ceiling light or the counter outlets
- the range hood’s duct headed for an outside wall
Nobody knows what a particular one holds until a section is opened, and the remodel guide covers when to open the soffit.
What do new upper cabinets look like if the soffit stays?
They are built to the soffit. At the measure the cabinetmaker takes the distance from the counter line up to the underside of the box, and the uppers leave the shop sized to that number. The tops sit tight under the soffit with no open ledge above them collecting grease and dust, and nothing to cover along the top edge. A stock line stops at its nearest standard height and leaves whatever is left over.
The soffit itself has two ways to look. Left as drywall in the same paint as the walls, it reads the way it does now, a box on the ceiling with cabinets under it. Cased in the same paint or wood as the doors, with a small molding where it meets the cabinet tops, it reads as the top part of the cabinetry. In a galley painted one color from floor to ceiling, casing is often what keeps a set of new uppers from looking short.
Keeping the soffit also keeps every upper shelf within reach of the counter.
What goes in the space when the soffit comes out?
More cabinet. The usual choice is taller uppers that run to the ceiling. The other is a second row of short cabinets stacked over the main uppers, which keeps the everyday shelves at their old height and gives the roasting pan and the holiday dishes their own doors above. Either way the top meets the ceiling under a crown or a flat trim set flush.
Tall single doors give the cleanest face, and the top shelf behind them becomes the one you need the stool for. A stacked row costs more boxes and more doors, and the small cabinets on top can take glass or stay solid.
Where the box stood, the ceiling and the wall above the old line need patching and paint to match the rest of the room. That is the drywall trade’s work and not part of the cabinet job.
Does taking the soffit out raise the price of the cabinets?
Yes, toward the upper part of the range. More cabinet goes on every foot of wall, so the per-foot price climbs. Shop-built custom in Owensboro runs $450 - $1,000 per linear foot installed with the finish included, and a brick-ranch galley comes to $8,500 - $18,000.
The stacked version adds more than the tall one, since each cabinet on top is a box with its own door and hinges. Casing a soffit that stays is a smaller line. Demolition, rerouting whatever was inside and the ceiling patch are priced by the trades that do that work, and none of it is in the cabinet figure. For what a galley costs by the foot and what else moves the number, see the cost page.
What if only one side of the galley can lose its soffit?
Then the drawing picks one top line for both runs, or makes the step between them look intended. In these kitchens the range often sits on one run with the hood duct inside the soffit above it, and the soffit over the sink run holds nothing but studs and drywall. One side could go to the ceiling tomorrow. The other cannot unless the duct is rerouted, and sometimes the duct has nowhere better to go.
A galley makes that harder than an L would. The two runs face each other across a narrow floor, so the top of one is in plain view from the other all day. Standing at the sink you look straight at the range wall’s uppers. Cabinets to the ceiling on one side and a soffit on the other read as a mistake from there, even when each side was built exactly right.
There are two honest ways through it. One brings both runs to the same top line. The open side gets uppers to the ceiling, and on the closed side the uppers run up to the soffit and the soffit is cased to match the doors, so both walls end at the ceiling in cabinetry and the duct stays where it is. The other makes the difference deliberate, treating the range run as its own wall with the hood and the cased soffit as one piece, so the change in height looks like a choice someone made.
Either one is decided on the drawing, with both walls drawn as elevations side by side and the soffit answer written on each run before either is built. Finding out on install day that the range side cannot match leaves one run finished and the other waiting on a decision that should have been made at the measure.