Ecklund’s Cabinets, Ruskin, FL

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT November 2022

Project: Complete Kitchen Cabinet Refacing

Location: Orland Park, IL

Lead Designers: Bob and Donna Ecklund

Doormark Featured Products: Shaker Sarasota doors and drawer fronts

Finish: Hudson with matching back

Project Notes: Bob Ecklund received a call from former Chicago-area clients who wanted his help to rectify their kitchen. As the story goes, when the owners purchased their more than 5,000-square-foot home about 10 years ago, the kitchen featured mahogany cabinets. Tired of the dark look, they had their cabinets painted gray. Alas, within a year the paint job started to crack and peel.

“I used to have a cabinet shop in the southwest Chicago suburbs before moving to Florida 18 years ago,” Ecklund says. “The client offered me a big enough job where I decided to temporarily set up shop. I changed my Angies’ listing to the Chicago area and took on a lot of other business, including for a Cubs player and his wife near Wrigley Field. I lived there for about a year to finish a variety of projects before returning to Ruskin.”

Ecklund and his wife Donna worked together on the Orland Park project that required replacing a combined 90 doors and drawer fronts. He said the owners decided to go with Hudson 3DL, because they decided they wanted to go with a somewhat darker finish again.

“For this refacing project, we came in and took all of the doors and drawer fronts off. We sanded and prepped the cabinet boxes and then applied cut sheets of the Hudson laminate from Doormark to the cabinet sides and bottoms. We always use contact adhesive, stick it, file it and clean it. It’s time consuming but it’s done right. A lot of guys are using peel and stick but I still do it the old-fashioned way.”

Ecklund notes that a special challenge of the project centered around the designer legs of the kitchen’s island. (See photo above.) “They were a fancy kind of leg that didn’t match the Shaker doors,” he says. “Because you can’t reface anything with all of those curves, I took four legs off and replaced them with 4x4s wrapped with the Hudson laminate. There were also two legs on the backside of the island that that I couldn’t take off, so I took 3/8” plywood and boxed them in before covering them in laminate.”

Ecklund says that while he will always call Chicago home, he won’t miss its winters. “We’re happy to be back in South Florida,” which is also much closer to Ecklund’s Cabinet’s go-to source, Doormark.

“They always come through for me. Their customer service is great. If I ever have a problem, they get right on it.”

Learn more about Ecklund’s Cabinets.