Cabinet materials

Boxes. Plywood is cross-laminated veneers — stiffer, holds screws better, tolerates a leak longer. Particleboard is compressed wood fiber and resin — flat, stable, cheap, and vulnerable to swelling if water reaches an unsealed edge. The place this matters most is the sink base and anywhere near a dishwasher.

Doors. Solid wood moves with humidity, which is why painted solid-wood shaker doors can show hairline cracks at the rail-to-stile joint over the years. MDF is dimensionally stable and takes paint beautifully, which is why many high-quality painted doors use an MDF center panel or a full MDF slab. Thermofoil is a vinyl film heat-wrapped over MDF: cheap, smooth, easy to clean, and it can delaminate near heat sources like an unshielded oven or a self-cleaning cycle.

Drawer boxes. Often overlooked and a good tell. Dovetailed solid-wood drawer boxes on full-extension soft-close glides are a meaningful quality signal; stapled particleboard boxes on side-mount roller glides are not.

The better filter than materials. KCMA's ANSI/KCMA A161.1 certification tests finished cabinets rather than arguing about substrate: doors cycled 25,000 times at a full 90-degree swing, wall cabinets gradually loaded to 600 pounds, shelves loaded at 15 pounds per square foot for seven days, drawers cycled 25,000 times at 15 pounds per square foot, plus heat, cold, spill and stain finish tests. Ask whether the line you are buying carries the seal.

How to choose

Ask what each part is made of

Box, door, drawer box and back panel are often four different materials. Get all four.

Put plywood where water is

Sink base and dishwasher-adjacent cabinets. Elsewhere it is a smaller difference than salespeople suggest.

Ask for the KCMA seal

ANSI/KCMA A161.1 certification is objective, testable, and harder to fake than a materials adjective.

Open a drawer all the way

Full extension, soft close, and a drawer box that does not flex tells you a lot in five seconds.

Check the cabinet back

A full plywood back that mounts securely to studs is better than a thin stapled panel.

Know thermofoil's limit

It is fine and affordable, but keep it away from unshielded heat and never expect to repaint it.