Kitchen Cabinets Lake Carmel NY | Vanities & Countertops

Kitchen Cabinets in Lake Carmel, NY

Lake Carmel is a hamlet of just over 8,000 people in the town of Kent, and it is the product of one Depression-era land scheme. The Smadbeck brothers dammed the Middle Branch of the Croton River in 1928 and put lots on sale in July 1930.

Kitchen cabinets Lake Carmel NY homeowners are fitting nearly always go into a house that began as a small cottage on a very small piece of ground. The lots were platted at twenty by one hundred feet — New York City dimensions — and sold for $96.50 with $12.50 down, and a buyer had to take two of them before being allowed to build. That two-lot minimum is why the original footprints are what they are.

More than twelve thousand lots sold, and the result is roughly 5,400 homes inside about three square miles — something like a third of all the housing in the town of Kent. Those cottages were winterised and enlarged after the war, a decade at a time, and that is the actual cabinetry problem. Additions meet the original block at slightly different floor levels, ceiling heights change from room to room, and the most useful wall in the kitchen frequently turns out to be holding up an extension.

Almost all of it is on private septic, on lots that were never sized for a septic field. The town's own attorney has described groundwater in parts of the area as sitting essentially at street level, and local replacement costs have been quoted in the fifty to sixty thousand range. That does not stop a kitchen being rebuilt, but it does mean the waste line has to be treated as a fixed point, and we say so plainly when a layout would force it to move.