Should I replace kitchen flooring before or after cabinets?

In most NB kitchen renovations, flooring should go down after the cabinets are installed, not before. This is the standard practice among professional kitchen renovators in Moncton, Fredericton, Saint John, and across the province, and it avoids several costly problems while saving you money on materials.

The primary reason is material savings and practical installation. Cabinets cover roughly 25 to 35 percent of your kitchen's floor area. If you install flooring first, you are paying for materials and labour under areas that will never be seen. On a 150-square-foot kitchen, that is 40 to 50 square feet of wasted flooring — which at $5 to $8 per square foot for quality LVP or $10 to $20 per square foot for porcelain tile translates to $200 to $1,000 in unnecessary cost. More importantly, placing heavy cabinets on top of a floating floor like LVP or laminate pins the floor down and prevents it from expanding and contracting naturally, which leads to buckling, peaking at seams, and premature failure.

This is especially relevant in New Brunswick's climate, where indoor humidity swings from over 60 percent in summer to as low as 15 percent in winter. Floating floors need room to move with these seasonal changes. If 500 pounds of cabinets and granite countertops are sitting on top of the floor, that movement is restricted, and the floor will eventually show damage. Installing cabinets directly on the subfloor and running the flooring up to the cabinet toe kicks gives the floor its full expansion gap.

When Flooring Goes Down First

There are exceptions where flooring-first makes sense. Tile floors that are mortared to the subfloor do not float and are not affected by cabinet weight, so tile can go down before or after cabinets — though after is still more cost-effective. If you are doing a cosmetic kitchen refresh and keeping the existing cabinets in place, your only option is to install flooring around them. And if you are planning to change the cabinet layout in the future, having continuous flooring underneath gives you flexibility.

The cabinets-first approach does require careful attention to height planning. Your cabinets, countertops, and appliances are all designed around specific heights. Standard base cabinets are 34.5 inches tall, and with a countertop, total height reaches 36 inches. If your flooring adds three-eighths of an inch (typical for LVP), the cabinets sit three-eighths of an inch lower than they would on top of the floor. This matters most for your dishwasher — it slides under the countertop, and if the countertop is too low because the cabinets are on the subfloor while the adjacent floor is higher, the dishwasher may not fit. Your installer can shim the cabinets up to the finished floor height or adjust the dishwasher legs.

The correct installation sequence for a full NB kitchen renovation is: demolition, any structural or subfloor work, rough-in plumbing and electrical, cabinet installation and levelling, countertop templating and installation, then flooring, followed by backsplash, trim, and final connections. Your kitchen renovator will coordinate this sequence — it is one of the reasons professional installation matters, because getting the order wrong creates problems that are expensive to fix.

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Looking for experienced contractors? The New Brunswick Construction Network connects homeowners with qualified professionals:

• Thirty Four Renovations
• Gionetterenovations