Finishing Touches- Part Three

After living with the peninsula the way it was for far too long, we finally decided that it might be nice to have some doors on our cabinets! 

     Since we wanted the cabinets to mostly blend in with the rest of the existing kitchen, we figured traditional rail and stile cabinet doors would stick out too much (and might be a bit beyond my skill set at this point). All the other doors in the kitchen were just 3/4" plywood rectangles, so it didn't take too much convincing for me to make the new doors the same way!
     I used the same 3/4" sanded Pine plywood I had used for the cabinets. By buying it at Home Depot or Lowe's, I was able to get it cut down to size on their panel saw, making the doors perfectly square. Not wanting to repeat the same mistake I made while finishing the bookcase, I made sure to really sand down the edges of the doors so that the rough plywood edge didn't show through the paint.
     Getting two cabinet doors to hang perfectly level and square to each other is difficult. Not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to think this, so they make hinges that allow you to make small adjustments once the doors are mounted. European hinges come in all different styles, one of which is specifically made for mounting doors to face frame cabinets--they even have a "slow close" feature for added fanciness.

Since my drill press doesn't have a fence, I clamped down a
block of wood to ensure that I was lined up properly front
to back.

     The hinges have a circular cup that sits recessed in the door, so I needed a way to drill a 1-3/8" hole... AKA I got to buy a new tool (my grandfather always says that every project should be an excuse to buy a new tool). A Forstner bit allows you to drill a perfectly clean, flat-bottomed hole--a necessity when using European hinges.
     Using my drill press, I drilled a few test holes to get the depth just right, then drilled into the doors for real. The hinges came with clear instructions as to where to drill the holes and how deep to make them, so everything went together pretty easily.
     We picked out hardware that comes close to matching what is already in the kitchen. If I was putting hardware on lots of cabinet doors, I probably would have taken the time to make some kind of jig to ensure they all came out exactly right, but it wasn't really worth it for just two doors.








The Mistake
     As with any of my projects, I knew I would mess up somewhere along the line. The issue here is that when I cut my doors way back when I first started the cabinets, I cut them to overhang by 3/4" on all sides. When I finally got around to buying the hinges, I had totally forgotten this. These hinges are designed for a particular overhang--when I was at the store, the 1/2" ones seemed way more common, so obviously that must've been what I planned for, right?
     And as is generally the case, I was in pretty deep before I realized my mistake...as in, both doors were mounted and I went to close them and realized that they banged into each other and wouldn't close all the way! At this point, I couldn't buy new hinges and redrill, so my best option was to rip 1/2" off of the handle side of each door. So of course I had to repeat all that hard work of polishing off and painting the plywood end. But in the end it was worth it--the doors closed properly and didn't look nearly as crappy as the edges of the bookcase!

The Drawer
     Alright, it was finally time to tackle my biggest fear: the drawer! I'm not sure why it frightened me so much--it was as if I felt that the entire rest of the project would live or die by this one sliding, 15" box. But when I finally bought the wood and drew up the plans, suddenly it didn't feel so daunting. I chose to build a simple rabbet and dado box similar to this.
     I used my router table with a 1/4" straight bit. I used 1/2" Poplar, which made it easy because all of the rabbets and dadoes were 1/4"x1/4".

My router table setup with my test piece. 

     While making the rabbets and dadoes (the cuts across the width of the wood), I realized that it was really difficult to keep the piece totally perpendicular to the fence by hand. what I really needed was a miter that would slide in the track to the left of the router. I have since made one, keep an eye out for that post.

The joint once assembled. It fit together really well, but I ended up with some
chip out on the edges.

     To attach the bottom, I put grooves along the length of the pieces 1/4" from the bottom. I left the router set with the 1/4" bit 1/4" high and adjusted the fence 1/4" away (like I said, everything was 1/4!). I made sure to cut the 1/4" plywood bottom 1/2" bigger than the inside dimensions of the drawer to account for the groove.

I glued it up and clamped the crap out of it! Nothing but glue holding this baby together!

The finished product (minus the false front of course)

     With the glue set and the clamps removed, I attached the drawer rails (I had mounted the other pieces inside the cabinet before I put the countertop on).

The drawer is slightly off, but once the false front is on, it will look like it is perfect!

    

     The false front was the same plywood as the doors, painted to match (with well polished edges!). I pre-drilled the holes for the drawer pull on the drill press and then used a spacer block to put it into place. With my 24" level, I made sure it was all squared up with the lower door and then drilled straight through the drawer front. The bolts for the drawer pull come through both the drawer front and the false front. I put two more screws in from behind just to hold everything in place, but I didn't glue the false front on for fear that something would shift down the road and I wouldn't be able to adjust it.
     After putting on the hardware and sliding the drawer into place, I couldn't believe that this whole thing was actually finished! It was almost bittersweet for a moment. From the day we closed on the house, the kitchen renovation had been the defining project--that which I was constantly obsessing over and talking about to friends and family who, in retrospect, probably weren't that interested. And now it was done. Our little baby house was growing up before our very eyes.
     But that's enough of that, lucky for me (I guess) I have way too many other projects to think about!

The finished product after two months of chipping away at here and there! Not bad for under $500!

Now that everything is said and done...

     A full accounting:

• 2 Sheets 3/4" Sanded Pine Ply   $60
• 14 board feet of Hard Maple      $67
• Pocket hole screws                     $15
• Ikea countertop                         $139
• Kitchen paint                              $36
• Slide out Trash bin                     $70
• Hinges and drawer slides           $30
• Cabinet hardware                       $20

Kitchen makeover grand total: $437

     So there you have it, the final installment in the kitchen series! The truth is, I've moved on to many more projects between finishing the kitchen and finally getting around to writing this post, so check back in to read about my next big project!

Kitchen Makeover Part Two

Finalizing the Plan

     The time had finally come to install the cabinets and countertop. The cabinets were completely assembled with three coats of bright kitchen white paint on them (no doors or drawer yet- I'm not a miracle worker). For counters, we wanted something that didn't look cheap, but actually was. We also needed to be able to cut it down to size without looking crappy. For these reasons, a plastic laminate counter was out; instead, we chose a simple, particleboard and birch-veneer counter from Ikea. The veneer is 1/8" so the counter looks like solid wood and if it ever gets scratched up or dented, we can just sand it down and re-oil it. And did I mention that it costs $140 for an 8-foot section?!
    Before going on an epic Ikea adventure, we needed to actually plan the kitchen down to the inch. I promise that I did actually draw it all out on paper to scale and everything, but it wasn't exactly the neatest floor plan, so I created a simplified drawing below.

The Problem(s)
     Originally, we planned on just having the two cabinets, which coincidentally created two problems. Problem one was that the peninsula would only extend 62" out (24" trash cabinet depth plus 38" double-door width). This seemed to be about a foot too short. Problem two was that we would need some way to support the 8" counter overhang; we could brace one end against the wall, but the peninsula end would need a leg or something for support.

The Solution
     I can't say where the idea came from--whether it was some online picture or a completely original thought from my own, generally unoriginal, brain. Regardless, it was brilliant--like kill two birds with one stone and look damn good while doing it brilliant.

Once again, I'm lacking in the pictures-of-my-works-in-
progress department, but you sort of get the idea here.
The two shelves were just glued and clamped to the
cleats on either side.

     The idea was to build a bookcase the same way I built the cabinets and turn it sideways to serve as an end cap on the peninsula. Not only would it extend the peninsula and support the counter, it would also provide a great place to store cookbooks and some of our flashier kitchen gadgets that we want to show off.
     Using the same 3/4" ply, I made the unit 12" deep and 23" wide (I learned my lesson from the double-door cabinet and made sure I left room for the 1" counter overhang on either side). I followed the same basic process as I did for the other cabinets, using the tablesaw to cut dadoes for the bottom shelf. Only afterwards did I realize that I should have made dadoes for the other two shelves too. So instead I used small scraps of wood on either side to act as cleats. I made them 3 inches shorter than the shelves so they provide enough support, but stay mainly hidden. I lathered it all up with glue and clamped the crap out of it so I didn't have to put any nails or screws into the shelves.
     The bookcase came out perfect except for one small detail: I didn't sand the front edges enough, so when we painted it to match the other cabinets, you could still see the rough edge of the plywood. But with enough coats of paint, it mostly disappeared.

The Epic Ikea Adventure

     The cabinets were finally ready to be installed, which meant that it was time to make a pilgrimage to Ikea. The Uhaul seemed like overkill, but we needed it to fit the 8-foot counters. Looking to build most of the furniture in our new house, we decided that we're mostly past the stage in our lives where semi-disposable Ikea furniture was acceptable. But that didn't stop us from spending hours wandering through the staged living rooms, kitchens, and tiny houses while gorging on Swedish meatballs, cinnamon buns and lingonberry soda.
     At the end of the day, we got our countertops, some random housewares odds and ends, all the Swedish food we could carry, and an insatiable hunger for more and more Swedish meatballs (we broke down and made our own for dinner the following week!).

Installing Peninsula Cabinets
     The installation started with putting the trash cabinet in place and leveling it off. Using a metric ton of shims, I leveled it front to back and side to side, all while keeping it square to the wall. Once it was finally just right, I screwed it into the wall and moved on to the double-door cabinet.

     Since there was no wall to attach the second cabinet to, I had to use a cleat screwed into the floor. First, I put the cabinet into place, got it all leveled off and used a big square to make sure that it was a perfect 90 degrees off of the first cabinet.
     With the cabinet exactly where I wanted it, I marked the edges with painter's tape, then moved the cabinet, undoing all of my hard work leveling it off. For a cleat, I used a scrap piece of 2x4, and put it into place using a scrap piece of 3/4" ply to space it from the painter's tape. The 2x4 got screwed into the floor, then with the cabinet back in place and leveled off (again!), I attached the unit to the 2x4 by screwing through the toekick and the side.
     We added the bookcase to the end and made sure the side was flush with the front of the other cabinet. Ideally, I needed a longer level (mine is only 24") to make sure the entire peninsula was level... but it still looked pretty good.

With the two cabinets and the bookcase in place, it was time to cut the counters to size

The Counters
     I checked, double-check, then triple-checked the length of the peninsula coming out from the wall, then cut it using a circular saw with a straight-edge guide. Important- make sure the counter is upside down when you do this, otherwise the rotation of the blade will damage the top edge of the piece. Because of the support column bump-out on the kitchen wall, I also had to cut a notch, so we made a template out of cardboard, got it to fit perfectly, then traced it on the counter and cut it with a jigsaw (again, keeping the counter upside down to avoid chip out).
     Once we put the counter into place, I went around and checked to make sure the overhang was consistent along the whole front edge. Then I checked for level (again, a bigger level would have been helpful), and shimmed where needed. We attached it all together by screwing up through the stretchers on the tops of the cabinet and bookcase. Where the counter butted up against the wall, I attached good-sized corner brackets to both support and hold it into place.

The peninsula counter just before we slid it into place

     After cutting the peninsula counter, the leftover piece was the perfect size for over the trash cabinet. Since I cut it with a circular saw though it wasn't as clean looking as the factory-cut end, so I turned it around and butted the factory end up against the peninsula. Again screwing up through the stretchers to hold it in place.

Notice how it's now dark outside, we've been working so long on this thing!

     With everything in place and bolted down, I caulked all the cracks against the wall and between the two pieces. I used a clear caulk so it wouldn't show after it dried.

     I cut a piece from our second slab of countertop to place over the dishwasher. To secure the piece, I put corner brackets all around and, since I couldn't get under it to screw up into the counter, put gorilla glue on the brackets and pushed the counter down into place. Again, I caulked everything so no moisture would seep in.

For now, our kitchen is fully functional! All we need are some doors and a drawer for the peninsula to look totally finished!

A Plan for a Dysfunctional Kitchen- Part One

The Plan and the Cabinets

     Without a wall between the kitchen and dining room, we now have a huge, open space for our kitchen. The goal is to completely gut and redesign the kitchen in a few years (I bet most homeowners say this sort of thing before living with a crappy kitchen for 20 years!). But that's our plan at least, so in the meantime, we needed a way to make this spacious kitchen actually functional.

What's that piece of glass between the two upper cabinets near the
sink, you ask... obviously it's a vertical florescent light! Because who
doesn't want a light where there should be a cabinet!

     When we bought the house, the kitchen hadn't been touched by anything more than a paint brush since the early 1960s. There was a total of about 5 feet of countertop between the sink and stove, and that was it. And did I mention that in that 5 feet, they somehow managed to use three different types of countertop? But wait, there's more! The cabinets are where it gets really interesting: there's a mix of homemade wooden cabinets that have settled considerably with age, along with '60s-era metal cabinets purchased from Sears & Roebuck. Throw in a stainless steel tile backsplash for good measure and you have one funky, dysfunctional kitchen!

     When you look at the room as a whole, the use of space gets even worse. On the left side of the kitchen, you have the fridge floating in the middle between a giant radiator and the door to the basement. As part of the wall remodel, we had the doorway to the basement moved to the dining room side, giving us some extra wall space to the left of the fridge. Since taking the wall down also allowed more heat in from the rest of the house, we opted to pull out the radiator without replacing it. We haven't regretted that decision yet, but it definitely does feel a little colder in the kitchen, especially with all the cold air pouring in the old, drafty window over the sink.

A dishwasher was a must!

     The first step, with the door and radiator gone, was to pull out the pantry cabinet next to the sink and move it to the radiator's former home. With this new space, we added a dishwasher next to the sink and put a piece of countertop over it (yes, the fourth type of counter in the kitchen, for those keeping score). More on the countertop in part two, but for right now, the rest of the plan.
     In the basement door's former home, we planned to put one single-door cabinet with a double-door cabinet coming out from the wall to form an L-shaped peninsula with bar stools between the kitchen and the dinning room. Planning the cabinets got a little tricky though. Even though the kitchen is spacious, there isn't quite enough room for a full 40"-wide island countertop, so we're stuck with the standard 25" width. After doing some research, I found that the recommendation for bar seating is a 12" overhang, which would only leave 13" for a cabinet. So this idea definitely needed some troubleshooting. But at least I knew the single-door cabinet would work, so I started there.

The Cabinets
     I began planning with a basic face-frame cabinet design that I found online. Since cabinets are basically just boxes with doors, it actually wasn't that difficult to modify the plans. I kept the height the same to maintain a standard kitchen counter height, but I did a fair bit of tweaking the other dimensions.
     Let's start with the single-door cabinet next to the fridge. We planned on storing the trash and recycle bins in this cabinet, so it needed to be large enough to accommodate them. I decided to stick with the standard cabinet depth of 24" and make it just wide enough to fit this cool roll out trash can holder I picked up at Lowe's. This contraption essentially made the cabinet into a giant drawer, so I had to account for the clearance it would need to slide past the other cabinet. My plan was to make the cabinet wider without making the door opening any bigger. The result was a 23" wide cabinet with only a 15" opening (The face frame is 4" wide on either side).

     Regrettably, I didn't take any pictures as I was actually building the cabinet... as a newcomer to the blogosphere, I'm still learning! So I guess you'll have to do with my mediocre explanation.
     The walls and sides of the cabinet are 3/4" sanded Pine plywood. I went with Pine because the cabinets are going to be painted white to match the rest of the kitchen. If I were staining them or keeping the raw wood, I would have opted for a nice Maple or Birch veneer plywood.
     The stretchers and the face frame are all Hard Maple that I picked up at the local lumber mill (way better and way cheaper than any hardwood you'll find at Lowe's or Home Depot). Luckily I have access to a table saw through a friend, so I was able to use that to rip all the Maple and make the dado cuts on the side pieces. Despite modifying the dimensions, I followed the assembly instructions from the article pretty closely. Using a pocket hole jig and a ridiculous number of large clamps, the assembly ended up being pretty easy. The hardest part of the whole process was finding a flat and level spot on my basement floor to build it!
     All in all, it went together pretty well! Not perfectly square, but pretty close for my first foray into cabinet building, and certainly good enough to hold a trash can. Now you may have noticed that there is a spot for a drawer... call it wishful thinking! For right now it provides a great way to throw small things away without opening the cabinet door; someday I'll get up enough confidence and actually build and install a drawer.
The Double-Door Cabinet
     Since we already had a few drawers in the existing kitchen and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed at the idea of building 3 of them, we opted to go without drawers for the second cabinet. Instead I followed the same plans for a double-door cabinet, and just went without the drawer stretcher and the cross piece on the face frame. The result was a 38" wide cabinet with doors stretching the full height.

The two cabinets as they will be set up in the kitchen. The single door
cabinet already has a few coats of paint and the roll out trash bin

     I made a few other changes to the basic plans: I made the face frame wider on the side butting up against the other cabinet to allow more room for the door to swing open.
     As I already mentioned, the big dilemma when planning this one came when trying to figure out how to leave leg room for bar stools and still use a standard 25" counter.
     Standard leg room under a counter is 12", but I figured we could shave 2" off of that and no one would really notice (not like I have any tall, basketball player friends). So then being the math wiz that I am, I cut the sides of the cabinet to 15", because 25-10=15, obviously! Too bad I forgot about the 3/4" face frame, the 1/4" backing, and the 1" of overhang on the front of the cabinet... so now suddenly my cheating-12"-down-to-10" scheme left us with only 8" of leg room under the counter. And of course I only realized my error after the cabinet was completely built--much too late to change the dimensions. It certainly was not ideal, but live and learn I guess. Obviously the lesson here is, as my grandfather always says, "measure twice, cut once." And in the process of measuring don't forget about all the other pieces!  All setbacks aside though, the second cabinet went together just as easily as the first.
     Stay tuned for part two where I talk about the countertop and the installation process.

The Beginning of Everything

     Here it is. Another young homeowner's DIY blog--an internet concept with about as much originality as a cat meme. Just another voice in the sea of far too many, determined to tell the world about all the projects around my house that I've attempted (for better or worse) to take a swing at myself. It's true that most of my undertakings were the norm, even what was expected of homeowners in a previous era. But after growing up in a world of "hiring out," I feel as though I'm charting a new path, even though there's nothing new about it. It is a path sought by many young homeowners of my generation; as any Pinterest peruser or channel flipper knows, DIY is very "in" right now.
     But this definitely isn't HGTV; projects don't magically get finished and they sure as hell don't always come out right. What you'll read here is my attempt at an unvarnished, honest look at what it's like to tackle this version of DIY home ownership. It's a journey I embark on not because its cool or cheap, but because of this real passion and desire to fix the broken, innovate the dysfunctional, and create the not-yet-existent. Some of my projects will work, some will probably fail miserably. And when they fail, I'll write about it extensively--the only thing more important than instructions on how to do something are instructions on how not to do something!
     If you're looking for complete originality, you won't find it here--I have no desire to reinvent the wheel. What you'll find is a mix of different plans and ideas that I've read about and discovered elsewhere, then changed somewhat or even significantly to perfectly suit our home. Maybe this blend of tweaked unoriginal ideas will inspire you, or maybe it will just look like the same crap you've seen 30 times already on Pinterest... I suppose there's only one way to find out!


     The House is a 1925, two-story bungalow with beautiful, original Pine woodwork and doors. The original hardwood floors are found throughout the house, with Curly Maple on the first floor and Southern Yellow Pine on the second. The basement is a huge space with a poured foundation and 7-foot ceilings. All in all, it's got great bones, but after years of neglect and no real updates since the 1960s, we certainly have our work cut out for us!

   The Floors

The wall and worn floors in all their glory

     Ironically, this story of home ownership starts with a hired-out renovation in which my only role was writing a check. When we bought the house, the original floors were in pretty rough shape. The damage was mostly superficial, with a few deeper dents and water stains, but overall, they needed some serious work.
     Wanting to do everything myself, I had grand visions of renting a drum floor sander and going to town. After all, how hard could it be to just push a sander back and forth? ...Turns out, pretty hard! After a bit of research I learned how temperamental these machines can be and how much damage you can do to your floors if you stay in one spot for even a split second longer than you should. It didn't take long to decide that I'd rather not try floor refinishing for the first time on my own 92-year-old floors. Most reasonable floor refinishers charge between $2-4 per square foot, depending on the type of wood. With a little under 1400 square feet of wood floor and a quote for $2.50/sqft, hiring a professional was a no-brainer.

The upstairs pine after being stripped down to bare wood

...And after a few coats of semi-gloss

  The Wall
     We were fortunate to have a bit of leeway with our move-in date, which allowed us to have the floors done while the house was empty. Since we had the extra time and a contractor who did more than just floors, we figured, "hey, why not tear down some walls at the same time!"

The wall is gone but the floors look even worse!

   The layout of the house was classic 1920s: a nice open dining room and living room, then a small, one-person kitchen hidden behind a full wall with a door. It's as though the goal was to keep the kitchen a secret, leaving only a small portal through which food could be magically transported into the dining room.
     So needless to say, that wall had to go! Being a load-bearing wall that held up half the house though, I again found myself outside my DIY comfort zone. So for a few thousand dollars more, we had the wall taken out while the floors were being refinished. The contractor put in an 8x8 engineered beam to carry the second floor load and wrapped the beam in beautiful, 14'-long pine boards, stained to match the rest of the woodwork.
     Taking out the wall also left a gap in the flooring, which he filled with an 8 inch maple board planed down to lie flush with the rest of the flooring. Since maple darkens with age and UV exposure, the 92-year-old floors looked considerably darker than the filler board. To lessen the contrast, he put a light stain on the new board before putting the topcoat on the entire floor.
     Once the floors were completed, the difference was incredible! The kitchen/dining room combo seems so obvious, I just don't understand why people of another era would have wanted it any other way. The wrapped beam and maple floor plank, running perpendicular to the floor boards, creates a visual separation of the two rooms. It doesn't feel like too big of an expanse, but at the same time there are no physical barriers between the rooms--just the right amount of openness.
       With the contractor's work complete, this is where my adventure begins...

The space is so big, I can only capture it with a pano shot! Notice the color
difference between the dining room and kitchen flooring... 92 years of the
sun coming in the dining room windows and never reaching the kitchen
because of the wall.