Mobile Home Kitchen Cabinets: The Do’s and Don’ts

It’s inevitable: with rising mobile home sales over the past few years, mobile home remodels are also climbing. In fact, we’ve seen an increase in remodels over the past few years, especially as indoor projects have spiked since 2020. 

One of the most popular mobile home remodel projects involve mobile home kitchen cabinets. They’re a popular feature to upgrade that can radically transform your kitchen to make it more modern and high-end.

If you’ve been wondering how to go about a mobile home kitchen cabinet installation, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll go over the basics of manufactured home kitchen cabinets, as well as answer some burning questions you’ll have before you get started. 

When you buy a mobile home, the kitchen will have at least a few cabinets throughout the kitchen. This holds true whether you buy your manufactured home new or pre-owned. 

Many people, while living in their mobile home, choose to remodel their kitchen cabinets. This can be for a variety of reasons. The homeowner might want cabinets that reflect modern design trends, such as cabinets made of oak or polycarbonate (depending on what your tastes are). Or maybe the cabinets are showing their age and are chipping or cracked in places. Or maybe a homeowner wants to increase the resale value of their home before they sell.

Because the cabinets take up a sizable portion of any kitchen, it’s important to consider them heavily when going through a kitchen remodel. This is why many hardware stores and websites have sections and pages dedicated to kitchen cabinetry. 

Yes, if you know what you’re doing. 

Many mobile home remodel projects are quite simple and can easily be done without professional help. Other major projects, such as moving your mobile home, cannot be done under any circumstances without professional help. 

A cabinet installation may fall in between those two types of projects. If you have the proper know-how and have done your research on how to safely install cabinets in your kitchen, then you can certainly do it on your own. 

However, cabinet installation comes with safety risks, and that includes cabinets in mobile homes. If you’re mounting cabinets on your kitchen wall, at the very least you should have several people assisting, if not having a professional contractor help you out. 

The best type of mobile home cabinets will depend entirely on the size and layout of your kitchen. 

Regardless of your kitchen’s size and layout, the best arrangement of cabinets should offer plenty of storage space for everything you could need in your kitchen. This includes cookware, silverware, dishes for dining and serving, and other containers and tools you’ll need as you cook and entertain in your mobile home. 

Just because you can’t fully replace your manufactured home cabinets doesn’t mean you can’t give them love. If you’re remodeling your mobile home kitchen on a budget, there are still a few things you can do with your cabinets to make them shine. 

For one, giving your cabinets a fresh coat of paint can go a long way. Many homeowners especially like to take their cabinets from a natural finish to an all-white color. This adds a modern flair to many mobile home kitchens and has been an incredibly popular move for years now. Or, you can consider a light green, blue, or gray if it matches your kitchen. 

Keep in mind that painting your mobile home cabinets isn’t usually the same process as, say, painting a room in your house. You may need specialized equipment, such as an airbrush, that can properly bind the paint to your cabinets, without getting paint on other areas of your kitchen. 

If you don’t want to fully upgrade your cabinets just yet, you can still upgrade your cabinet’s hardware. This ranges from the knobs and door handles to the hinges that help your cabinet doors open buttery-smooth. Newer cabinet hardware on your cabinets can be a subtle, yet effective way to increase their longevity. 

If you’re getting ready to start a mobile home kitchen cabinet project, there are a few things you should never do for the safety of you and your home. 

First, you should never begin a kitchen cabinet project without having a detailed plan of how your project will get done. If you start tearing out old cabinets or installing new ones willy-nilly, you may do some serious damage to your kitchen. This can include damaging the walls of your kitchen, not to mention damaging other items in your kitchen – or even yourself. 

To that end, you absolutely should not destroy your old cabinets as you tear them down. For one, this can lead to personal injury or damage to your kitchen if you’re not careful. Two, you may want to keep the old cabinets on-hand. 

Perhaps a neighbor will want to buy them off of you. Or, you could always recycle or repurpose them. Either of these options are preferable to throwing away scrapped cabinets.