The vocabulary a kitchen quote will use

Allowance

A budgeted sum in a contract for an item you have not chosen yet, most often cabinets, counters, tile, appliances or fixtures. If the item you eventually pick costs more, you pay the difference. An allowance schedule that lists each one separately is what turns a quote into something you can hold to.

Backsplash

The finished surface between the countertop and the underside of the wall cabinets. Usually tile, sometimes a short stone upstand cut from the same slab as the counter, occasionally full-height stone. It is set after the counters so that it lands on the finished surface.

Base cabinet

A cabinet that sits on the floor and carries the countertop. Standard height is 34 and a half inches to the top of the box, giving a 36 inch finished counter height once a typical top is on. Depth is normally 24 inches.

Bearing wall

A wall that carries load from the structure above it down to the foundation. Removing one requires a beam sized for the span, posts carried down to something that can take the load, and in California a design that accounts for seismic forces. A non-bearing partition carries only itself.

Butcher block

A countertop made from strips of hardwood glued together. Warm, repairable by sanding and re-oiling, and needs sealing around a sink. Priced at $40 to $100 per square foot installed in published national figures.

Cabinet refacing

Replacing the doors, drawer fronts, hardware and visible end panels while keeping the existing cabinet boxes in place, usually with a veneer or laminate skin over the face frames. Worth considering where the boxes are sound and the layout already works.

Carcass

The box of a cabinet, as distinct from the door and drawer fronts. Carcass material and construction is the largest difference between a cheap cabinet and an expensive one, and it is the part you cannot see in a showroom display.

Change order

A signed amendment adding work that the original contract did not cover, carrying its own price and its own effect on the schedule. A project without a change order process has verbal amendments instead, which is how disputes start.

Chase

A boxed enclosure built to hide a duct or a pipe run, most often the one carrying a range hood duct up to the ceiling. Whether a chase is needed, and where it can go without looking like an afterthought, is part of the cabinetry drawing rather than a decision for the day it is built.

Crawl space

The void beneath a raised floor. Its presence is one of the most consequential facts about a kitchen project, because it makes moving drain and vent lines dramatically cheaper than it is in a slab-on-grade house.

Dye lot

The production batch a run of tile was manufactured in. Color varies slightly between batches, so a top-up order placed later will not reliably match what is already on the wall. It is the reason the ten to fifteen percent overage for cuts and breakage gets bought at the same time as the rest.

Filler strip

A narrow piece of matching material used to close the gap between a cabinet run and a wall, or between two cabinets that do not add up to the space available. Stock cabinetry needs them because it comes in fixed widths. How well they are scribed to the wall is a fair proxy for installation quality.

Flush beam

A beam that sits up inside the ceiling framing so the finished ceiling runs through unbroken where a wall used to be. It costs more than a dropped beam, which hangs below the ceiling line and stays visible, because the joists have to be cut and hung off it. In a house with a low-slope roof there is sometimes not enough depth to conceal one at all.

GFCI

Ground-fault circuit interrupter, the protection fitted to receptacles serving kitchen countertops. It cuts power when it detects current leaking to ground, which is the failure mode that matters near water. AFCI, arc-fault protection, is a separate device covering branch circuits.

Hard-wired

An appliance or fixture connected directly to the electrical system rather than plugged into a receptacle. Some kitchen equipment is hard-wired by design, and it affects both the rough-in and what can be swapped out later without an electrician.

Island

A free-standing cabinet run in the middle of a kitchen. Whether one works is a clearance question rather than a taste question: it needs enough aisle on every side for appliance doors to open with somebody behind them. A sink or cooktop in an island brings drainage or ventilation with it.

Lazy susan

A rotating shelf fitted into a corner base cabinet to make the space at the back reachable. It has to be specified at the time the cabinets are ordered, because a corner cabinet without one is largely wasted volume.

Linear foot

The unit cabinets are usually priced in: one foot measured along the run of the wall, counting base and wall cabinets together in most quotes. It is worth confirming what a given quote includes in the figure, because that varies between suppliers.

Makeup air

Air deliberately brought into a house to replace what a high-capacity range hood extracts. Without it, a powerful hood in a well-sealed house pulls the pressure down and can draw air in through places you would rather it did not, including a combustion appliance flue.

Punch list

The list of small unfinished or imperfect items agreed at the end of a project, from a door that needs adjusting to a run of sealant that needs redoing. It is always longer than anybody expects, and it is worth walking the room in daylight to write it rather than accepting that everything is done.

Quartz countertop

An engineered surface made from crushed stone bound with resin. Pattern is consistent across the run, no sealing is required, and what is in the showroom is what arrives. Published national installed figures put it at $50 to $200 per square foot.

Rough-in

The stage where plumbing, electrical and ductwork are installed inside the walls and floor before anything is closed up. It is the last cheap moment to move a socket, a tap or a light, because once the drywall is on the same change becomes a repair.

Scribe

Cutting a piece of material to follow the actual, imperfect line of a wall or ceiling rather than a straight line. Good scribing is the difference between cabinetry that looks built into the room and cabinetry that looks placed in it.

Seismic design

Designing structure for sideways movement as well as for the weight it carries. Walls resist lateral force, so taking one out removes some of that resistance along with the vertical support, which is why a beam replacing a bearing wall in San Diego County is engineered rather than sized by rule of thumb.

Semi-custom cabinets

Cabinetry ordered from a manufacturer's catalogue but with dimensions, finish and internal configuration varied to suit the room. The middle tier between stock and custom, and usually the right answer where a kitchen has a soffit, a bulkhead or an out-of-square corner.

Slab-on-grade

Construction where the floor is a concrete slab poured directly on the ground with no crawl space beneath it. Common across the newer eastern Chula Vista communities. It means any change to drain locations requires saw-cutting and patching the concrete.

Soffit

The boxed-in section above wall cabinets that closes the gap to the ceiling. Removing one and running cabinetry to the ceiling recovers real storage, which makes it a common upgrade in older housing. What is inside it, sometimes ducting or plumbing vents, needs checking first.

Template

The precise measurement a countertop fabricator takes from the installed cabinets, digitally or with a physical pattern, before cutting the stone. It cannot happen before the cabinets are in, and the two to four weeks between template and installation is a real gap in the middle of every kitchen schedule.

Toe kick

The recess at the bottom of a base cabinet that lets you stand at the counter without your feet hitting the cabinet face. Whether the floor runs under the cabinets or stops at the toe kick is a decision made before the floor goes down, and it is what determines whether a future floor change means pulling cabinetry out.

Undermount sink

A sink fixed to the underside of the countertop rather than dropped into a hole in it, so the counter edge runs straight into the bowl with nothing to catch crumbs. It has to be fitted at the fabricator or on installation day, which is part of why the sink is out of service for the whole countertop template gap.

Wall cabinet

A cabinet hung on the wall above the counter. Standard depth is 12 inches, with heights varying by whether the run stops below a soffit or continues to the ceiling. Going to the ceiling adds storage and changes how tall the room reads.

The FAQ answers the questions these terms usually raise, and the guides work through each of them in context.