Kitchen Renovation: Mini Series Part 3

Arguably one of the riskiest decisions I made when designing our kitchen was the decision to build our cabinets on my own.  A lot of the modern conveniences in cabinetry I decided to forgo to build them the "hard way." I built faces with inset doors, a kitchen sink cabinet with no toe-kick and scalloped doors, and full-size drawers made to fit without metal or wooden slides. 

This renovation was all about maximizing the storage capacity of the cabinets.  After living with a poorly-configured kitchen for a long time, I had my priorities!  I also knew it would make getting into some areas of the kitchen a bigger challenge for our young children, and I didn't mind some... natural child-proofing either.  It's been helpful when the toddlers are exploring now!  But I ultimately decided on this construction method because among our dressers, buffet, and myriad of antique furniture, not a single piece was modern construction.  Soft-close drawers have never been a thing in the house, so I didn't see the need for them now.

To catch up on how we landed on these designs, head to:  Part 1 | Part 2

​Function First

I built the cabinets, and ultimately did demolition of the old kitchen, in phases.  Since the fridge side of the kitchen didn't have cabinetry, I figured that was a perfect place to start adding it.  Once we removed most of our things, we demolished the lower cabinets, moved the stove and old fridge to the garage, and laid the sheet vinyl floors (not a glamorous choice, but a good one for where our lives are now.  Real linoleum will likely be our next floor.), we needed to set up a temporary kitchen to keep the house functional.

At the time, our house only had plumbing in a single bathroom and this kitchen: I had to keep as much functionality in the kitchen as I could while we worked.  Take out just wasn't an option for every meal during the summer!  So, I used a free-standing utility sink, some storage cabinets my mom was replacing, and a countertop my grandpa salvaged to set up a new workspace. I used a hotplate and microwave to get us through. Since we didn't have the utilization we do now of our basement space, that was really the best way for us to keep the renovation chaos under control.  We still had plenty of spill-over into the dining room.  

Bungalow Design

One thing I love about our bungalow is that the kitchen is truly separated from the interconnected living and dining rooms, which gave me a lot of wall space but no space for a true island.  I'm just fine with that: islands aren't my thing, and it does give me a lot of flexibility in how we use the kitchen.  There is room for freestanding pieces, a small table... at one point I had a small sofa in there.  True flexibility.  

With that, we started with the empty side of the kitchen.  It is one of the original walls -there was an addition of the back porch and vestibule in 1953- and we decided to keep the refrigerator, storage, and secondary workspace on that half of the room.  I amended my original plan to include the glass doors from the neighbor, and based the overall design of that section on butler's pantries.  The rest of the fridge side is all pantry storage.  

​Cabinet Construction

Since I hadn't built cabinet boxes in several years, I was honestly a little intimidated to get going on this project.  There were a lot of deep breaths, and a lot of checking and double checking every possible thing I could.  The first cut was an exercise in trusting the process: it was a rip cut on a ten-foot-long $100 piece of marine-grade plywood: the main body of my cabinet carcasses.  It went perfectly.  

Not everything was smooth: My first run of face frames practically exploded on me after I failed to get the huge stretches of lumber perfectly square to the cabinets... and true to the walls.  I wound up doing a lot of dry-fitting after that, and it was the first big hold up early on.  The next issue was getting the hinges on the salvaged doors to stop binding.  Since these were the original hinges, there was almost no room for error in cutting the mortises.  But everything eventually went in, and my stubborn "I will get this" attitude paid off. Then it was the painstaking process of building the doors.  Each took about two hours to build, and another half hour each to hang.  My only regret is that I hadn't yet acquired self-centering drill bits.  That would have made that process so much easier!