Kitchen Renovation: Mini-Series Part 4

In building the cabinets for our kitchen, we divided the room into two halves.  I first worked on the pantry side before tackling the the cooking side.  That allowed me to always have a little bit of storage either through temporary pieces and the old upper cabinets or by moving things to the new cabinets after that half was done.  It was logistically a lot to figure out, and we stored a lot in the basement too.  

I started in the corner pantry, adjusting my measurements to meet the *slightly taller* refrigerator that we had initially specified, and fitting the tallest pieces into place set me up for success for the rest of the kitchen.  The room may not be square, level, or plum, but the cabinets are!  The fine-tuning that went into getting the cabinets just right was a process that has helped me get a lot done in this house: from leveling bookshelves to getting basement spaces planned.  Old houses require a different kind of creativity.

Catch Up on the rest of this series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Drawer Construction

Cabinet construction is a precise process.  It's definitely not for the faint-of-heart, and drawer construction is much the same.  I had designed all eight of the drawers to be friction-fit instead of on tracks as modern drawers are.  So each individual drawer had to be precisely made to the exact measurements of the glides in cabinet box.  It was tricky to say the least.  

I'm not a professional cabinet maker, so I did what I could to find a construction technique that would be both strong enough to last and user-friendly enough that I could actually build the things.  I landed on essentially making boxes with pocket screws.  Between the glue and screws in each joint, the cabinet drawers are holding up very well.  And unlike most modern drawers, the bottoms are thick.  Thick enough that they easily support the weight of everything I need to store without a single problem.  I do question every once in a while if this was the right move for our cabinets, but I look at the construction of our century-old buffet, and the similarities let me know that it should be just fine.  I wound up going back to this method when I added the wardrobe to the kids' room.

Upper Cabinets

Once the drawers were done, we had a lot more to accomplish with the sink and stove.  Knowing how completely out-of-level the corner of the room was... I started with the upper cabinets.  The process for the boxes was pretty easy, but getting them hung was a HUGE challenge!  I suspect the kitchen addition was once a covered porch, and the way the studs moved in the wall confirmed that for me: There was a distinct dividing line between the original construction and where walls had filled in above the porch rail.  It was a bit of a mess to find studs, and I remember making a few exploratory holes to make sure I was on the right track.  

Eventually, everything was hung on the wall, and the the kitchen uppers were solidly in.  The face frames were a different story.  Much like how I had struggled with them on the pantry side, the sink side gave me some struggles as well.  This time, in how out-of-plum the walls are.  I had to scribe the frame along the wall to avoid pretty massive gaps.  Looking at it now, with the stained cabinets it blends in very well, and the scribed edge is barely noticeable.  The last of the upper doors were built and installed without much trouble at all.  

Lower Cabinets

The lower cabinets around the sink, dishwasher, and stove were tricky.  Not only was I working around old plumbing, new plumbing, and the stub for the old gas line (we decided not to remove it for a variety of reasons), the floors are also out of level by over two inches in about a four foot space.  I started by figuring out where I wanted the counter and the top of the sink backsplash to be on the wall.  And I drew almost a full elevation of the sink wall across it to make sure it would land where I wanted. 

Like the uppers, the lower cabinets took a lot of scribing, and a lot of shimming to get level, but I really only built one cabinet in the corner.  With moving the stove over, I was able to make the 5" door into the back corner a 24" door into the corner cabinet.  We also dropped our plans for fancy pull outs or features, and opted for a half-depth shelf instead.  That gives us a good mix of tall storage and shorter storage.  Mostly, things in the back have been items we've kept that need storage for longer periods of time: the electric roaster, toddler items/baby items when they were out of age, and seasonal or holiday items rotate through there easily. 

​I did end up adding a little cabinet at the back door next to the dishwasher.  Instead of the little 6" cabinet working as a deep cavern -like most of the cabinets we replaced- I put the door on the side!  It's great for quick-access items when we're stepping out the door, and my only real last-minute addition. 

The cabinets were definitely the hardest part about getting the kitchen set up, but we learned a ton in this process!  I'm really happy with the results, with what I learned, and with what I was able to teach my big kids.  It was all big wins with this project.