Galaxy Frost ADA Base Cabinets

Accessible work surfaces and lavatory rims are held to a maximum of 34″ above the finished floor. A standard base cabinet is 34½″ tall before you put anything on it, so it is over the line by itself. Lowering the box to 32½″ leaves headroom for a top and gets the finished surface where it needs to be.

Read that last row carefully. A lowered box plus a thick slab can still finish above 34″: a 3cm stone with a built-up edge, or tile over a mud bed, eats the margin the shorter cabinet just bought you. Give the fabricator the target finished height in writing — 34″ maximum — rather than the cabinet height, and let them work backwards.

The floor counts too. Finished floor means the surface someone rolls on, so tile added after the boxes were set raises everything with it. If flooring goes in last, say so before the cabinets are installed.

Height is the easy part. The hard part at a sink is the space underneath, because a wheelchair user has to get knees and toes into it to reach the faucet at all. The published minimum is roughly 27″ of clear height at the front edge and 30″ of clear width, running back far enough to let someone get close — all measured to the lowest obstruction, not to the cabinet floor.

What eats it: the bowl, the trap and the supply valves. A standard 8″-deep basin in a 34″ counter leaves very little above 27″, which is why a shallow bowl in the 5″ to 6½″ range and a rear or offset drain are standard practice — the offset pushes the trap out of the knee space rather than hanging it in the middle. Exposed hot water and drain lines also have to be insulated or configured so a leg cannot touch them; wrap kits are cheap, and nobody ships them with a cabinet.

A clear floor space in front, on the order of 30″ by 48″, has to exist for someone to occupy in the first place. That is a plan problem rather than a cabinet problem: it is why an accessible sink rarely works in a corner or in a 36″ galley aisle. Our clearance guide works through aisle widths, and the layout guide covers which plan shapes leave room to turn.

Twenty-three lowered configurations exist in this white, in four groups. Every SKU carries the ADA- prefix after the GF, which makes them easy to pick out of a long quote.

• Kitchen sink bases — GF ADA-SB33-R, ADA-SB36-R, ADA-SB39-R. Note the 39″, a width the standard sink base range does not offer: a wider bay makes the 30″ minimum knee width easier to hit around a bowl.
• Vanity sink bases — GF ADA-VSB30, ADA-VSB33 and ADA-VSB36, in more than one variant per width. These run 24″ deep against the 21″ of a standard vanity box, so an accessible vanity projects further into the room and eats the clear floor space in front of it. Catch that on the plan, not on install day.
• Door bases — GF ADA-B12 through ADA-B36, single door up to 21″ and double from 24″ up. The straight storage boxes that fill out a lowered run.
• Drawer bases — GF ADA-DB15 through DB24, plus vanity drawer bases at ADA-VDB12 and ADA-VDB15. These are the ones to over-order, for the reason in the next section.

Prices here run from about $416 to about $809 per cabinet — a narrower band than the standard bases, because the group holds no corner or specialty units. One ordering note: several widths appear twice under different codes, GF ADA-VSB36-R and GF ADA-VSB36-WH-R for instance. Those are not duplicates, so confirm in writing which variant is on your quote before it ships.

Most people who land here are not building to a code. They are remodeling a house they intend to stay in — for a parent moving in, or for themselves in twenty years — and they would rather do it once, while the walls are open. The useful thing about a lowered box in that situation is that you do not have to commit the whole room: one accessible zone at the sink or a prep run, standard 34½″ cabinets everywhere else. Two counter heights is a design decision, not a mistake, as long as the break falls at a natural point.

Three things we would pay for regardless of whether anyone is in a chair today. Drawers instead of doors wherever the budget allows, because a full-extension drawer comes to you and a shelf behind a door has to be knelt in front of. Pull-outs in whatever door cabinets remain — the accessory range has them in this paint. And lever or touch controls on faucets rather than knobs, which is a plumbing choice but the one most likely to matter first.

These are the same Galaxy door, the same ½″ veneered plywood box, the same dovetailed drawers and the same Blum soft-close hardware as the standard base cabinets, so a mixed-height run never announces itself as a modification. Match them with wall cabinets, tall cabinets or standard-height vanities from the same collection.

Accessible work is the one place a drawing pays for itself, because these mistakes are not fixable with a filler.

1. Which standard the job is actually held to, and who signs off on it.
2. The target finished counter height, given to the countertop fabricator as a number rather than as a cabinet size.
3. The sink: bowl depth and drain position, both settled before the cabinet order, because both decide whether knee clearance survives.
4. Clear floor space and approach at every accessible fixture, drawn to scale.
5. The flooring, and whether it goes in before or after the boxes are set.
6. Pipe insulation — a separate purchase from a separate trade, forgotten every time.

Send the room dimensions, the fixture list and any constraints you know about and we will draw it — our design service is free, and it is the cheapest place in a project to find a two-inch problem. Contractors specifying this repeatedly should start at Captivating Pro.