Every kitchen remodel eventually hits the same fork in the road: do the floors go in before the cabinets, or after? Get it wrong and you either waste money flooring under cabinets nobody will ever see, or trap your appliances behind a floor height they can no longer clear. Here is how we sequence it.
The short answer
Floating floors — most laminate and click-lock luxury vinyl — go in after cabinets, because a floating floor pinned under cabinet weight cannot expand and contract the way it must. Glue-down vinyl, tile, and nail-down hardwood can go in before cabinets, which gives a cleaner look at toe-kicks and keeps your options open for future cabinet changes.
The detail everyone forgets: the dishwasher
If new flooring raises the floor height in front of a dishwasher that sits under an existing countertop, that dishwasher can become permanently trapped — a genuinely common and genuinely maddening discovery. We check appliance clearances before a single plank goes down. It takes five minutes and prevents the worst phone call in remodeling.
One contractor, one sequence
The floors-versus-cabinets question is really a symptom of a bigger issue: split contractors with nobody owning the sequence. Because we handle flooring, tile, cabinets and counters as one scope, the order of operations is planned once, by one team, with one point of accountability.
Planning a kitchen in Los Alamitos, Cypress, or anywhere else in Orange County? Start with the free in-home consultation and we will map the whole sequence before demolition day.
Thinking about kitchen and bathroom remodeling?
Free in-home estimates across Los Alamitos and all of Orange County. We bring the samples to you.
