The challenge: tenants come home tonight

In 2024, a builder took on a 27-unit apartment renovation. Nearly every unit was occupied.

The plan was demanding: tear out the kitchen and bathroom in the morning and install all new cabinets and countertops, so tenants came home that evening to a working kitchen and bath. One two-man crew, two to three units a week.

There was no slack in that day. Any time spent on the cabinets themselves was time the crew didn’t have.

How it usually goes

On a job this size, the standard approach is to order everything up front and stage it on site, usually in a couple of shipping containers.

Every morning, the crew digs through the container to find that unit’s boxes. They cut away the cardboard. They pull every door to prep for install. Only then can they start demo.

If a cabinet comes out of the box damaged, they grab one meant for another unit, reorder, and hope it arrives in time. Now two units are at risk.

With a two-man crew, that morning routine alone would have broken the schedule.

What we did instead

We ordered all the cabinets at the start of the job and assembled them in our shop. Any damage or discrepancy got caught there, weeks before install day, not by the crew. We supplied the laminate countertops too, so cabinets and tops came from one source.

Then we delivered each unit’s cabinets the morning they were needed:

• Assembled, with doors already off, so the boxes were ready to set
• Tagged with part numbers, so the crew knew where every box went
• Counted through Jobsite Verified, every cabinet and trim piece accounted for
• Packed in foam, not cardboard, for the short ride from our shop in the Cabinet Hauler

The crew loaded the hand carts, rolled into the unit, and started setting boxes.

The result

Every unit got its cabinets in, with a working kitchen and bath by the end of the day, just as the builder planned. The rest of each renovation took longer, but the cabinets were never what held it up.

When the job closed out, the builder told us over lunch that they couldn’t have done it with another supplier.

What happened next

That was the last job for that company. The owner retired and closed the business. Both installers went out on their own, and today they use us on their construction jobs. They even install on some of ours.

The takeaway

On a tight schedule, the cabinets either work for your crew or against it. Assembled, checked and staged to your schedule, they’re one less thing standing between your crew and the next unit.