Published April 2003

Business brisk
for cabinet makers

By Bryan Corliss
Herald Business Writer

Amid all the bad economic news, here’s some good: the cabinet-building business is booming in Snohomish County.

“It couldn’t really be much better,” said Dick Noble, one of the owners of Architectural Cabinets Northwest in Arlington. “We’ve got all the work we could dream of doing.”

“It seems like when interest rates got really, really low, people started remodeling,” added Stephanie Wilson, one of the owners of Wilson’s Custom Cabinets of Lake Stevens.

Snohomish County and its former timber towns are home to a cluster of cabinet makers, said Donna Thompson, a state labor economist based in Everett.

“These kinds of things spring up, generally, where there’s been a lumber industry,” she said. “When you look at the Yellow Pages, you’re going to see a ton of these guys.”

Open up a Snohomish County phone book, and you’ll see close to six dozen cabinet makers or manufacturers with telephone listings, ranging from Canyon Creek Cabinets in Monroe, the giant of the local industry with $50 million in sales and 470 workers, to much smaller operations such as Cabinets by Joe in Everett.

The precise number of companies, and the workers they employ, is hard to pin down. They fall under three different headings, the way the state does its industry and work-force counts.

But those three sectors combined added 18 percent more employees between 1998 and 2001, Thompson said — a sign of overall strength in construction trades.

Most of the cabinet companies are small, she said. The vast majority, as much as 90 percent, is made up of companies with fewer than 10 employees. Cabinetry is the kind of business where people can go into business for themselves, or maybe with a partner, she said.

Architectural Cabinets Northwest has 23 workers. Wilson’s Custom Cabinets, seven.

Business for these people has been good, and the reasons are twofold, Thompson said.

One is population growth: “Snohomish County keeps growing and building more houses and apartments and condos,” she said. “Every new house or apartment needs cabinets.”

And the second is low interest rates, which has spurred a wave of remodeling, Thompson said. Homeowners can “refinance, take some money out of the house and redo the kitchen.”

Wilson’s Custom Cabinets’ story is typical of many in the business.

Jim Wilson started the business in the family’s garage in the mid-1980s, his wife, Stephanie, said. Woodworking had always been his love, and “he never worked for anybody else real well,” she said.

His first job was designing and building new kitchen cabinets for his parents, who bought him the tools to do it. In time, the business expanded to fill three small manufacturing buildings in Lake Stevens. They’re now considering a new larger building, Stephanie Wilson said.

Most of the cabinets they make go into new homes, both Wilson and Noble said.

But both say they’re seeing growth in the number of high-end remodeling jobs.

The sheer number of orders is down, but the jobs they are getting are larger, and more profitable, Stephanie Wilson said.

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