Inside the shop
Welded, not bolted.
Most outdoor kitchens are panels held together with hardware, or masonry built in place over months. Ours are welded aluminum, built to order on a shop floor in Homosassa, Florida, and delivered as one finished piece. Here is every step of that.
The backbone
This is what is behind every door.
Aluminum extrusion, cut to your build, squared in a jig and welded corner to corner into one rigid box. No brackets and no fasteners holding the structure together, so there is nothing to work loose over a few Florida summers. You will never see it again once the doors go on.
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- 1Welded cornersEvery joint welded out, corner to corner. Not a bracket and a fastener.
- 2Appliance bayCut to the grill you chose, before the frame ever leaves the jig.
- 3Trash slide-outStandard in every kitchen we build, along with the LP tank slide-out.
- 4Leveling feetAdjustable, so a patio with a slope on it is not a problem.
- 5Door uprightsDoor hinges screw into welded aluminum uprights, not into a panel that can pull loose.
Why welded
Weld what should never move. Screw what comes off.
There are screws all over our cabinets. Hinges, drawer slides, panels. What there are none of is screws holding the cabinet together.
Open a door and you are looking straight at the frame. Bare aluminum, welded at every corner, with the doors, drawer faces and end panels fixed to it from the inside. Nothing is glued, so any panel comes off from in here with a screwdriver. A welded joint cannot work loose, because once it cools there is no joint left to loosen. Two lengths of aluminum have become one.
That is rarer than it sounds. Very few makers publish a welded frame at all, and the largest name in the category documents a bolt-together build in its own assembly manual.
The frame ships bare aluminum, on purpose, and you will never see it once the doors are on. The aluminum floor pans are bare too, and they close out the bottom of every bay, so nothing sits on bare ground and rain that gets in has somewhere to go instead of somewhere to sit.
Light enough to walk into place
This is the one that surprises people. A masonry island is genuinely heavy, and one maker publishes 906 lb for a seven foot run and 2,495 lb for an L-shape. Ours is aluminum and polymer, and it is a fraction of that.
Better still, it comes apart without tools. The doors lift off quick release hinges and the drawers pull off quick release slides, so you can take the weight out of the cabinet, walk the frame through a gate or up a step, level it, and put the doors and drawers back on in a few minutes. Nothing gets unbolted and nothing gets measured twice.
No insulated jacket, and what that saves you
Put a grill inside a plastic box and the opening has to be lined with a metal jacket first. That is not our rule about their cabinets, it is the polymer industry's rule about its own material, and one maker voids its warranty outright if a heat appliance goes in without one.
A jacket runs $600 to $1,000 per grill.
Our grills drop straight in. The frame around the appliance is welded aluminum and no polymer goes near the opening, so there is nothing combustible next to the fire to protect. Your appliance still arrives with its own installation instructions and those always govern, but there is no jacket to buy.
Every panel is a part
Here is the payoff of screwing the skin on. Put a deep scratch across an end panel four years from now and it is not a repair, it is a replacement. We ship you the panel and the instructions, and you are done in twenty minutes with a screwdriver.
Almost nobody else in this business can say that, and it is not because they did not think of it. When the panel is the structure, a damaged panel is a structural problem.
Our doors and drawers are colored all the way through the material, so most marks do not show in the first place. If one ever does, it is a part.
The one part that needs you
An honest exception, because you will find this out eventually and we would rather it came from us. The hinges and the drawer slides will corrode if they are ignored. They are metal, they live outdoors and they have moving faces, which is the combination that gets any hardware in the end.
A silicone spray two or three times a year is the whole job, and it is written into the care guide that ships with every kitchen. When a slide eventually wears out, it is a screwed-in part like all the others.
Want the real numbers?
If you read spec sheets for fun, so do we. Email us and we will send the drill-down on any part of the build: the alloy, the welds, the hardware, the coating. We know these cabinets inside and out, and we would rather answer a hard question than dodge one.
The real comparison
What you would notice, standing in front of both.
No spec sheets. These are the things you can check for yourself, on delivery day and again four years later.
Why install day is the one that costs
Separate boxes means leveling legs fitted on each one, each box leveled on its own, and then all of them joined and squared up, because the countertop has to sit flat across the whole run or you will see it. On most of them the finished back panel and the end panels are separate line items with their own part numbers, so the cabinet you priced is not the cabinet you were looking at.
Ours arrives as one piece with the panels already on and the countertop already bedded on silicone. Level it once, connect the gas, and cook the same day. Most setups run under an hour.
And we are not against any of it. If you want a permanent masonry island, build masonry, and if you want mirror polished stainless, we do not make that either. What we would argue about is the right hand column.
How it's built
Cut to crate.
Every kitchen is welded, fitted, and finished by hand in Homosassa, then crated as one finished piece. Here's what that actually looks like on the shop floor.
Step 01
Before you buy anything
Seven questions worth asking.
Ask us, and ask everyone else you are considering. We think the answers tell you more than any brochure.
- Is the frame welded, or fastened? Ask to see a photograph of the bare frame.
- Does the grill need an insulated jacket, and what does one cost?
- What carries the countertop, a frame or the panels themselves?
- What is between the stainless top and the metal underneath it?
- If I put a deep scratch in a panel five years from now, what happens?
- What does the warranty actually say about the finish? Read the warranty document, not the web page.
- Where is it built, and who owns that building?
Ours, in order. Welded, on a jig, in our shop in Homosassa.
No jacket. The frame around the appliance is welded aluminum and no polymer goes near the opening, so there is nothing combustible to protect. That is $600 to $1,000 you do not spend.
The frame carries the countertop, down through the frame to the leveling feet.
Silicone, which bonds the top and keeps two dissimilar metals apart.
We ship you a new panel and the instructions. Twenty minutes with a screwdriver.
We do not cover fading, because nothing anyone sells can honestly promise a color will never shift in Florida sun. What we do not do is rule out corrosion altogether, which some of the biggest names in this category do in writing. The exception is hardware that never got maintained, and no warranty anywhere covers that.
Homosassa, Florida, and we do.
Now build yours.
Pick your size, layout, finish, and appliances, and see the price update as you go.
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