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.