Kitchen Remodel

Ever since we moved into our 1974 vintage home we've not been satisfied with the kitchen. Not only were the cabinets wearing out, but they also weren't all that nice when new. More than that the kitchen just wasn't designed very well. There are lots of dead corners, hard to access lower cabinets, lack of counter space near the cooktop, and just a general inefficient use of space. I've always thought I should be able to design & build something better and I'm finally making some progress towards reaching this goal.

This is a “before” photo taken shortly after we moved in. A couple of things to notice. In the upper left of the photo, you can see the cabinets suspended above the peninsula. These cabinets visually cut the kitchen off from the dining area and made both spaces seem smaller. These have already been removed. You can also see that the row of cabinets in the photo is split right down the middle by the fridge leaving precious little usable counter space on either side. The left side corner cabinets (especially the lower) are nearly inaccessible black holes. Trust me, the other side of the kitchen has similar problems...

The first big step to getting a new kitchen came, surprisingly enough, when we had trees taken down in 2007. The tree that was growing about 15 feet from the southwest corner of our house, a nearly 100-foot-tall white oak, had appeared to be rotten at its base but after it was felled, we found that the trunk was sound. Through a happy set of circumstances, we able to have the trunk, a 30-foot-long section tapering from about 22 inches at the base to about 16 inches on top, sawed into lumber as a part of the sawmill demonstration at Sauder Village in Archbold, Ohio. Not only did they saw my tree into lumber for free they also gave us passes so Ben, my dad, & I could watch them do it! The resulting lumber will be used for the door & drawer fronts and the face frames of our new kitchen cabinets. Here are a couple of photos showing the sawmill at work.

The wood from a tree that has recently been cut down is too wet to use so I stacked my big pile of boards in my uncle Marv's barn to dry. While waiting for the wood to dry Sue & I started planning the new kitchen design. The major changes include replacing the separate cooktop & wall oven with a free standing range, eliminating as many dead corners as possible, and maximizing the counter space near the range, sink, and fridge. Using Google Sketch-Up, Andy & I modeled the new kitchen. The model isn't exactly perfect but it should give you a pretty good idea of what we have in mind. Take a look....

The rule of thumb is that green wood should air dry about a year for every inch of thickness so after letting the lumber sit for about a year and a half I brought it home. My intent was to use my dad's planer and spend a weekend milling the boards to the correct thickness. To my surprise a weekend was barely enough time to get a good start. I found that running the full stack through the planer twice, which will reduce the thickness of each board about 1/16 inch total, would take a full day! At the end of each of these full days I would need to get out a snow shovel to clean up the great mounds of sawdust! Here's a photo – to put this into perspective, the board leaning against the planer is a one by six about nine feet long...

The lumber has, at long last, finally been planed to the proper thickness. Although this is a big milestone there's still a LONG way to go. Next steps, complete the cut list, buy plywood for the cabinet boxes, and rip the boards to the correct widths.

I've taken advantage of a week off from work and have been able to make some real progress. We started my vacation week by getting the plywood to make the cabinet carcases. We don't have a vehicle big enough to haul the 4' by 8' sheets so we borrowed my dad's truck & trailer and picked up 10 sheets of ¾ inch oak plywood for the box sides and shelves and 7 sheets of ¼ inch for the case backs and drawer bottoms.

Of course, I want to use my materials as efficiently as possible so I entered the list of all the plywood parts that I will need into a program that I found on the Internet called cutlist341. This program was able to print out diagrams showing how to cut the plywood with the least possible waste. Here's an example.

Instead of using a table saw to cut the plywood into the required parts I used my circular saw along with a very cleverly designed fence/jig called the EZ Smart Guide System. I'm quite impressed with this jig. Other saw guides that I had used in the past allow the saw to wander a bit when making the cut making it very difficult to make precise cuts. This jig completely eliminates this problem and makes it easy to achieve good results.

Cutting things up is all well and good but the object of the exercise is to make cabinets so it was especially rewarding to actually start assembling the carcases. Here's the first (and simplest!)

Turning a stack of lumber into a bunch of cabinets is not a simple project. Great amounts of shop time this week was spent figuring out things as I worked. Now that I've got a good start the project should, in theory, go more quickly. Here's the first upper cabinet.

The fruits of my week's labor. Six down – six to go!

It's been slower going since my vacation but I have been making some progress on those occasional days off when we don't have other things to do. Here are the first eleven cabinet carcasses – only two to go! Now if you're paying attention you've noticed that the cabined count increased from twelve to thirteen between my vacation and now. This is because I decided that it would make more sense to build two small, simple cabinets in place of a single large, complicated one that was in my original design. Although I think this change is a positive thing it's still a bit disconcerting that my “finalized” design isn't as final as I thought it was... The two that remain to be built are the tall cabinets. These will be the trickiest of the bunch to build, not only because of their large size but also because they must fit precisely in the space between the soffit ant the floor. No room for error here...

When the carcasses are completed the next step will be face frames.

Assembling the face frames has been rather slow, tedious work. Lots of parts to mill, lots of joinery, and very close tolerances all add up to a time consuming project. At least they're starting to look like cabinets now. They'll look even more like real cabinets once I put the backs on but I think I'll wait till I've applied finish to the insides of the cabinets before I take that step.

The arrival of winter weather has made the made the shop too cold to comfortably work in for very long, so I decided to bring the cabinet boxes that I've already made into the basement and apply the finish. The first four have received their three coats of polyurethane. They're looking pretty good if I do say so myself!

Progress continues to be slow over the long, cold winter but I have been able to get fully a dozen cabinet carcasses face framed and varnished. I was also able to install the pull-out shelves on a couple of the lower cabinets including the fancy corner cabinet pull-out shelves shown in the photo above.

One would think that it should be easy to figure out how tall to make each drawer on a four drawer base cabinet but it didn't work that way for me. Most commercial cabinets have either four equally sized drawers or one shallow and three deeper drawers of equal size. My design follows the Shaker tradition of making each drawer a unique height with the shallowest drawer on top and each one below it incrementally deeper. The problem is that there is more than one way to lay out graduated drawers and I spent way, way more time than it was worth determining which way was "best". Take a look at the drawer spacing in the photo above. Does it look OK to you???

Work has been progressing on my kitchen cabinet project, even though it’s been a fair while since I’ve posted an update. Perhaps the biggest step has been the completion of the final two cabinet carcasses, shown above. These were the largest of the bunch and the prospect of making them intimidated me. I’m glad they’re done. I had intended to make the paneled doors next but decided to put that bit off after becoming frustrated when the doors refused to go together properly. So – now I’m working on the cabinet drawers. You can see the blanks for the drawer fronts in the foreground of the photo above. So far I’ve got all four drawers made & installed in one cabinet and, just as importantly, become comfortable this the process so the other dozen drawers should (in theory) go together more quickly & easily.

There are a bunch of drawers in the cabinets I’m building , seventeen to be exact, and making them has been rather a long process. If you look closely you can see that I used solid wood (soft maple) for the drawer boxes. I think the maple looks much better than plywood even if it's less convenient to work with. I also made a point of using full extension drawer slides so things won't be as likely to be lost in the backs of the drawers. Andy's been a big help varnishing the drawers (as well as the final two cabinets)so we are now very nearly done. We just need to varnish and install the last few and then apply the drawer fronts. The next step will be to make the pull-out shelves and then the cabinet doors. You know, there just may be a bit of light at the end of the tunnel!

Despite the fact that the original plan was, obviously enough, to have all the cabinets 100% completed before bringing them in we decided to take advantage a vacation week to tear out the old cabinets and install the new even though the doors haven't been completed. Here's a photo of the old cabinets being torn out.

The first three cabinets being set in place for a test fit. We thought we'd have to completely gut the kitchen & replace the underlayment before we could start installing cabinets but the flooring we chose can go on top of the existing underlayment so we were able to do one side of the kitchen at a time.

The latest step in our kitchen remodel project has been trimming out our new kitchen window. This has been (another) multi-step process. The replacement window we choose is has a vinyl frame with energy efficient glass. The bit that makes these windows special is that they have real oak panels that snap into the vinyl sash frame so they appear to be made of wood from the inside. An advantage of this arrangement is that I was able to remove the wooden parts, finish them, and put them back without worrying about the finish gluing the window shut.

Here is the window as it was installed. Note that the window isn’t as thick as the wall so the first step was to make spacers to make the window frame appear to be the same thickness as the wall.

Here are the oak bits that will clip onto the vinyl frame as well as the window molding in the back. Much easier to finish this way than it would have been to do it in place.

Project completed! Having the window trimmed out is a big step toward making the room look more like a real kitchen and less like a work zone. The window trim matches the cabinets quite well. The next step will be to get back to working on the cabinet doors and drawer fronts. The weekend was too cold to be working in the shop but I was still able to put the finishing touches on one more cabinet. I put the last coat of finish on the drawer fronts of the three drawer cabinet on Saturday and installed the fronts and pulls on Sunday. Looks pretty good, don’t you think?

The temperature on all of my days off lately has ranged between too cold and way too cold to be working in my (unheated) shop so I’ve been making precious little progress on our kitchen project. Even so, I have been able to check a couple small items off the to-do list.

First I installed a third pull out wire basket on the lower section of the microwave cabinet. One would think that should have been easy but, well, it wasn’t. It was well worth the effort. As you can see Su is already using the new basket.

Today I fixed the pantry pull out on the tall cabinet next to the fridge. We installed this cabinet quite some time ago but the lower pull out just didn’t work as well as it should. When I took it apart I discovered the undermount slides were a bit out of parallel. That problem has been resolved and it now works just fine. I’ve finally been able to assemble, finish, and install the first six upper cabinet doors. All the pieces for these doors had been cut out months ago but only now have I been able to complete these final steps. Six more doors are ready and waiting for the final glue-up and finish steps and yet another six (or eight if you include the doors for the big storage area in the hallway) still need to be made. Here are the first six…

Here is the tall microwave cabinet with its four new doors. Yes, I know it looks silly to have the beautiful doors and no front on the drawer. Now that the doors are in place I can cut the drawer front to the exact width.

The other two new doors are on the small cabinet above the fridge. On the right you can see the jig I made to locate the screw holes for the cabinet pulls.

I applied the final coats of varnish to the latest batch of five cabinet doors this week and installed them today.

With the doors on the sink cabinet we can no longer see the cleaning products and plumbing, attractive as they are. We think the full height doors look better that the typical false-drawer-on-top design.

The three doors to the left of the microwave cabinet came out quite well. A measuring/mental math error when making the cabinet’s face frame made me fear I’d need to make the doors different sizes to keep the spacing between them consistent. By using hinges with different offsets on each door I was able to work around the problem. I’ve got to say I’m rather pleased with the result.

I was on vacation last week and spent most of the time working on the kitchen and made real progress. It took a bunch of time to assemble and varnish the last four doors. The first door, the largest in the kitchen, is at the end of the peninsula and opens into the dining room. It’s on the left in the photo.

Inside the cabinet is another set of the same pull-out wire racks we used in the microwave cabinet. Su has already filled these with cookbooks!

The second door is for the corner cabinet. this one required special hinges so that you can access the pull out shelves inside. The other two doors completed this week will go on the built in cabinet on the wall to the left of the fridge but those will have to wait until I have a chance to build matching frames.

I also installed LED under cabinet lights to the left of the microwave cabinet and to the right of the fridge. They came out quite nicely if I do say so myself.

If you're real observant you noticed that I spackled over the flaws in the back splash and sealed it with a quick coat of primer. It looks much cleaner and brighter now. I’ve been able to check a few more items off the ever shortening to-do list. First I covered the raw two by four cabinet bases with quarter inch oak plywood. Most kitchen cabinets just use black hard board in this area but I thought it would look better to match the cabinets. Each piece needed to be scribed to match the contours of the floor (not as flat as it appears) so it took a fair while to accomplish. Here, take a look.

The other thing to notice in this photo is the knob on the corner cabinet. Here’s the same cabinet with the door open.

Another of the week’s projects was applying an oak face to the small knife drawer and making the cut-out to use a a pull. I’m pleased by how well it came out. Today’s project was installing the last two paneled doors in the kitchen proper.

To the left you can see part of a dark stained built in cupboard door. As you see the built in is around the corner so it obviously can’t be considered to be “in” the kitchen.. In any case, replacing the cupboard doors with oak doors to match the kitchen is next on the agenda.

The last doors have finally been installed. This brings the major sawdust producing phase of the project to an end. We still have a lot to do before we’re ‘done’ but this is a big milestone!!

Painting the walls (covering the patches, primer, & flaws in the old paint) made us realize the project was coming to an end. The latest bit was making & installing a “proper” butcher block beside the range. I made it from a chunk of 8/4 hard maple sliced the same thickness as the rest of the countertops and glued together into a solid slab.

I’m happy to report that our kitchen remodel project has been completed! Installing a tile backsplash gave the kitchen that finishing touch.

Designing and building the kitchen has been quite a project! Our new kitchen has been years in the making, and we've worked hard to complete it, but it has been well worth the time and effort. The new cabinets look much nicer than those they replaced and the kitchen design make much better use of the space. I'm confident that the cabinets have been built to a higher standard and with higher quality materials than all but the finest available commercially. Su says that it's the nicest kitchen she's ever had. I've enjoyed the challenge of turning a tree in the yard into a kitchen full of cabinets and am well pleased with the result.

*Kitchen Remodel*

Kitchen Remodel