Kitchen Renovation, Part 3: Lower Cabinets (April 2008 to November 2008)
With the windows replaced, we were now free to start building the cabinets. This was done in three phases, the first of which involved the lower cabinets along the wall (the upper cabinets and peninsula came later).
For the most part, we kept the utilities in their existing places, but where the original layout just had cabinets against one wall, we wrapped additional cabinets along an adjacent wall and moved the sink out slightly to place it in a corner that makes it convenient from anywhere in the kitchen. This more than doubled the amount of countertop space, made room for a dishwasher to the left of the sink, and made the whole kitchen a more usable and functional space.
Sheets of plywood preparing to meet the circular saw. Because of space limitations, much of the cutting and some of the assembly was done off-site at my in-laws' house, and then schlepped back to my house for installation.
The stupid, bleary look on my face is evidence that we started work this morning before breakfast or a shower.
In the foreground is the cabinet that will go to the right of the stove; behind that, the sink cabinet is being dry-fitted.
All of the lower cabinets, dry-fitted and laid out in approximately their final configuration. This is the view you'd see if you were standing on top of the dining room table.
Having assembled as much as we could off-site, we then brought the components back to my house for installation. Unfortunately, the sink cabinet is large enough that it wouldn't fit through the door when fully assembled, so that would be assembled in-place. On the left is the cabinet that will go to the right of the stove (shown here upside-down); the unassembled boards and the half-cabinet are all parts of the sink cabinet or the curved cabinet to the left of the dishwasher.
Bress' First Law of Clamping: The number of clamps needed for a given project is n+2, where n is the number of clamps you have available.
This particular cabinet required every clamp I own, plus a few borrowed from friends and family, and I still didn't feel like I had enough.
The blue clamp in the foreground is a modern aluminum bar clamp; beyond that is a cast-iron flooring clamp that belonged to M's grandfather. Those old clamps weigh a ton, and unlike a modern clamp, there's nothing to keep that free-sliding jaw from sliding down the bar at high speed and damaging any human fingers that happen to be in the way. I got whacked with one of these that had slid just a few inches, and it broke skin; I suspect that if allowed to slide the full length of the bar (6 feet), it could have lopped a finger right off.
In the foreground, construction continues, while in the background dinner is made. Making progress on the renovation while maintaining a space we could still live and cook in was one of the biggest organizational challenges of this whole project.
Because nothing is quite level in a >110-year-old house, leveling out a cabinet as complicated as this one would prove tricky. To accomplish this with the least swearing possible, I bought a number of leveling feet from Lee Valley.
All of the supports attached to the cabinet; we were now ready to remove the existing sink cabinet and put the new one in its place.
The existing sink plumbing. The water supply lines were a labyrinthine mess that had clearly been redone several times; this pic shows that one supply line is in this cabinet while another jogs over from the adjacent cabinet. What this pic does not show is the shutoff valve on the adjacent supply line, which was oriented directly against the wall of the cabinet, making it effectively impossible to shut off. This will all be simplified and redone with the new cabinets.
Until the new sink is put into place, dishes will have to be done upstairs in the bathtub, so time is of the essence.
When it came time to do the leveling and installation, this doohickey, a laser level, was extremely helpful. While a traditional spirit level was also used, I'd have torn my hair out if that was my only leveling tool.
A notch (cut in the back of the cabinet to make room for one corner of the sink) shows bright laser lines on either side.
For the leveling legs that were not easily accessible from below, I drilled a hole through the base of the cabinet, coaxial to the leg. Then I dropped a screwdriver in, which engaged with a slot inside the leg, allowing me to raise and lower the leg from above. I'm not sure if they were designed with this in mind, but it certainly works. After leveling, the hold was filled in with a birch plug and sanded down flush, so the hole is nearly invisible.
A strip of scrap wood temporarily tacked in place across the gap where the sink will go, to ensure leveling.
With the sink cabinet installed and leveled, we put the dishwasher and curved cabinet temporarily in place to check that everything fit as expected. It all did, so we then moved it back out of the way and prepared to install the sink.
We decided that we wanted a farmhouse sink (aka Dublin sink, apron-front sink, drop-front sink, etc.), but the only solid-surface farmhouse sinks are 36" wide, which wouldn't work, and retail for more than my first car. So, we found an installer who was willing to build a custom sink-box assembly. The sink was undermounted to a color-matched piece of countertop stock, and then an apron facade was made out of the same material.
Viewed from the front, it looks like a solid 1-piece farmhouse sink; Rudie can't tell the difference either.
View from above; a truss of 2x4s will span across this space and rest on the 2x4 braces at the upper left and lower right of the photo.
The line of screws attaching one of those braces to the wall of the cabinet. Probably overkill, but such is my way.
Same truss seen from the opposite side of the cabinet. The puddle of water indicates that some minor plumbing was going on at the same time.
The whose assembly, with the sink now permanently installed and and the dishwasher enclosure and curved cabinet temporarily moved in for a photo op.
Because the drawers and doors wouldn't be finished until much later (we opted to do them all as one batch), I made a temporary drawer out of a cardboard box.
The old dishwasher, one of those wheeled jobbies that hooks up to the sink. It served us well for our apartment-dwelling years, but its time had come, so we wheeled it out to the car and delivered it to a friend's house.
The top edge of one of the sides of the curved cabinet got a little mashed in a mishap that had me swearing up a storm, but it'll be under a countertop and barely visible unless you know where to look. Still, I'll know it's there.
Screws that hold the curved cabinet to the wall. These will be plugged, sanded, and stained so that the mounting is nearly invisible.
Because the center shelf is only supported on two sides, any heavy object could cause it to flex, so I had to come up with a clever system to strengthen it without visible brackets.
This was achieved by chiseling a small mortise into the wider wall of the cabinet, just flush with the bottom of the shelf.
This mortise is just wide and tall enough to allow the horizontal arm of an L-bracket to pass through.
Because the vertical portion of the bracket is mounted on the non-visible back of the cabinet, you can only see the bracket if you get down on your hands and knees (or if you're under a foot tall).
The bracket mounted to the back of the cabinet; the dishwasher will fill this space and hide the bracket.
Once the cabinets were all installed, the countertop installers came in and did their thing. That sentence makes it sound like a quick and simple thing, but in fact it was probably the most stressful portion of the remodel thus far. The guys we hired for the job were unreliable and argumentative, so it was a constant struggle just to get them to get the job done right. I don't really have many pictures of the actual installation process, because I was too busy trying not to strangle their foreman. An important lesson learned in hiring subcontractors, to be sure.
Closeup of the farmhouse sink. While the overall look is more or less what we were going for, the rim where the white sink meets the black countertop is not quite as we had hoped. As originally drawn up, the transition between the two was supposed to be seamless - the countertop could curve down straight into the vertical wall of the sink. The contractor assured me that he understood this and that it could and would be done, but changed his story when he showed up to do the actual install, and at that point it would have required several more weeks and probably a lawsuit to send him back to the shop to fix it, so we let it be. It's not bad as it is - the seam where the countertop meets the counter is smooth and relatively easy to keep clean, and certainly a darn sight better than an overmount sink - but it's not really what we had hoped for, either.
New countertops to the right of the stove. That little gap between the cabinet and the wall we eventually be filled with a slide-out folding stepladder, if I can engineer one slim enough, or a spacer if I can't.
New countertops over where the dishwasher will go. Note that the faucets are not yet installed, nor are the holes for them drilled.
Note the just-removed sign that had been attached to the sink while I was finishing up the plumbing: "DO NOT USE"
At this point we temporarily installed the dishwasher, even though we knew we'd eventually have to pull it back out again to install the facing on the sink cabinet next to it.
Soon enough, though, I pulled the dishwasher back out to install the facing (that is, the nice finished wood you'll see when the cabinet is finished) on sink cabinet and over the dishwasher. Normally, you'd install facing before this stage, but I was rightfully worried that the countertop installer would screw something up that required modification of the facing, so I decided to wait until he was out of the picture. Attaching and finishing facing on an already-installed cabinet is a pain, but it was better than the alternative in this case.
Installing the facing over the dishwasher and on the uprights of the sink cabinet - a case of very creative clamping to keep everything in place and avoid marring the countertops.
The colorful rags are to draw attention to the bar clamps so I don't accidentally clothesline myself on them.
This spot presented a bit of a challenge, both in the shape of the facing required and the logistics of attaching it.
This is a cross-section of the facing that I custom-routed for that spot - a nasty and nerve-racking bit of work in which I was constantly reminded that my father lost a sizable chunk of his thumb on a router.
Because of the placement of this piece, it would have been very difficult to clamp it in the traditional manner. Since I had access to the area under the sink, I decided, "well, if you can't push, you'll have to pull." So, I installed eye hooks in the back of the framing, and cut corresponding slots in the back of the plywood.
Once the framing was glued into place, I then looped a wire through the eye hooks and cinched it tight around some of the framing around the sink; this provided the pressure that couldn't be applied by a clamp in order to keep it in place.
