The Kitchen Soffit for Dummies

Kitchen soffit

We don't know about you, but it always seems suspicious to us when we run across freelancers who tell us to do something that they don't understand well enough to name. You know, like someone who tells you to "turn the doohickey" or "remove the thingamabob"? That works all right, we guess, when the speaker can point to the gizmo in question, but written instructions? We expect better. That's why Jagg Xaxx, he of the disturbingly fake pen name, is picking up his fifth award for the eHow.com post "How to Cover the Gap Between Wall Cabinets & the Ceiling."

Jagg... the "name" makes us retch... claimed in his introduction that,

"Many homeowners have wondered about that somewhat useless space that exists between the top of their upper kitchen cabinets and the ceiling."

Well, no, most probably haven't. It's there because wall cabinets are usually 36 to 40 inches tall and start at 53 or so inches from the floor, which leaves a foot or so above them with an 8-foot ceiling. Most people don't really care... and a lot of houses have a soffit there already. Xaxx would have you build one yourself, even though he claimed that.

"For commercial cabinet installers, this space is useful because it saves them the trouble of custom-fitting a set of cabinets to a ceiling that probably isn't perfectly level."

We submit here that commercial installers are quite probably better equipped to handle such a ceiling than is the average DIYer, but that didn't seem to bother Jagg. He just told his readers to build a frame of 2-by-4s that will fit in the space between the cabinet top and the ceiling, screw the top plate to the ceiling joists, and slap on some drywall. According to Jagg, when you have the drywall all spackled,¹ you complete the job thusly:

"Apply a piece of finish trim to the joint between the top of the cabinets and the bottom of the drywall. Apply a crown molding to the joint between the top of the drywall and the ceiling."

We suppose that, if there isn't a soffit there already, some people might want to add one. Then again, most people would probably be OK with running a course of crown molding around the tops: it's how the pros do it, after all.

We'd have been more forgiving of Jagg's work had he not screwed the pooch in two different ways: first, there's a 50:50 chance that the top plate of your soffit will run parallel to the ceiling joists: what do you do then? and second, Jagg never said a word about enclosing the open end of the soffit. Guess he'd met his minimum word count!

The main reason, however, that Xaxx earned himself Dumbass of the Day award number five? He never used the word "soffit" to describe the soffit he was building!

¹ Jagg seemed unaware that you use joint compound to tape drywall, not spackle.

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DDIY - CABINETS