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.