Day Six-twenty-two: more kitchen fun

We did a second day of work on the kitchen and made solid progress on all fronts.

When you put the last pieces in at 9pm as we did yesterday, the chances of making little mistakes and eyesores goes up quite a bit. Our first step in correcting those gaffes--which mostly consisted of pieces out of alignment--was to plaster all the seams like so.

Then came a thorough sanding--to smooth the bare wood and more importantly to level all the surfaces.

The power sanders did a nice job, making nearly everything into a smooth surface, including this juncture.

With all that done we put a coat of flat white paint on as a primer. An added bonus is that the paint allows us to see where the remaining flaws are that we will need to touch up with a little more spackle.

Meanwhile the new doors got their first coat of paint, also flat while serving as a primer.

Finally, we had a little time in the past few weeks to do a fun project--transforming a few pieces of cypress decking into a little ornamental box. The bottom is a trapezoid mitered at 45 degrees on all four sides and the sides are mitered to sit on the base and at 45 degrees with each other. Some sanding, a couple coats of paint, and a couple coats of Bona Mega to seal and protect the paint and there you go!

Day Six-twenty-one: shelving

So about 15 months ago we completed the lower cabinetry in the kitchen by building an angled shelf to connect two parts. While we like and use the shelf, the dowel rod supports never quite fit and especially won't now that we're converting to a more traditional farmhouse style kitchen. If you've been following along on this trek with us what do you think we did next? Yep, we replaced the dowels.

So here's a refresher and what we started with this morning. Not horrible, just not right.

We started by squaring off the shelf. When we made this last year we didn't have anything beyond a circular saw and jigsaw so we made the shelves too narrow.

Fortunately when we trimmed down the poplar boards that will be the new supports we created some long, narrow strips that we mitered to fill the gaps.

A little Elmer's wood glue and a couple small finishing nails and this part of the project turned out well.

With the shelves all set we turned to installing new supports. Here we've removed the ones on the left.

And here is the (glue drying) final result.

Tomorrow we'll use caulk or spackle to fill any gaps and level things out before sanding. Once that's done one whole side of the kitchen will be ready for painting.

Day Six-fourteen: one step forward...

one step back, one step forward. Isn't that how the saying goes? If not, that's how it works around here. 

We had the setback of needing to put a coat of something over the paint to protect it. Fortunately a local flooring store had Bona Mega in matte. Victory! Well, until we realized--only after painting all of the drawers and the smaller doors--that the color was wrong. We had picked a pale green that we really liked but when we put it next to the green countertop, yellow walls, and white oak floor it was too minty green. Bummer. So we went back to the color wheel and found three new possibilities.

Which would you pick?

In the meantime, we had to sand off more of the cabinets to take the new paint. It's slow-going. It took all day to do this and the next small cabinet.

Ok, time's up. We picked the color on the far right and have already tried it out on the small cabinet.

With the color chosen we could put coats on all of the components that were formerly green--drawer fronts, the small doors, brackets for shelves, and the new cabinet/shelf that we have to install.

Day Six-o-eight: kitchen continued

As promised (threatened) we continued to forge ahead on the kitchen today and made some decent progress until we hit a snag.

Everything that will be installed got their final coats of paint. It might be hard to see in these pictures but the new color is a light shade of green that will go great with our green countertop.

The snag is that the paint shows marks really easily. What to do considering we won't want to go through all of this effort only to have a dingy looking kitchen in a day? We decided to add a step--to seal the fronts of the cabinets, shelves, etc. with a coat of a low-gloss version of what we put on the wood floors and stairs. That should give it a nice durable finish without making the whole thing too shiny.

Back up stairs we tested the concept of our inset idea on the cabinet that we sanded yesterday. For those of you attempting the home version, here's what a normal drawer looks like.

And here's what the slide looks like for that standard drawer. You can see that the hardware comes all the way to the front of the cabinet.

Step one of the conversion was to trim off 3/4 inches off the metal slides so that they'd fit further back into their brackets. Here's what the slide looks like at first.

And here's how much we cut off, just enough to slide it further back but still sit in the bracket at the back of the cabinet.

Here's the bracket.

With that done we needed to secure the front part of the slide, which is now 3/4 of an inch behind the face of the cabinet. This way the drawer can slide further back than it used to, to accommodate the new drawer front.

Here's the interim result. Once we have the new front finished (with the low-gloss sealer) we can attach it and we'll have one drawer done.

Day Six-o-seven: final frontier

So this weekend we're beginning the last (no, really, we mean it this time) of the big indoor projects. We're transforming the look of the kitchen to more of a farmhouse style with inset doors and drawers. Here's what things looked like as of this morning.

So the steps to accomplish this are:

• Make drawer fronts...check.
• Purchase new maple cabinet doors...check.

• Paint the above...in progress (each round of painting these and the new cabinet takes more than an hour of painstaking work).

• Sand off paint on existing cabinets...in progress (this was about 3 hours worth of work).

• Install new doors...still to come.
• Install new drawer fronts...still to come.
• Shorten drawer slides so drawers recess...still to come.
• Repaint cabinets...still to come.

We also have a new wall unit to install above the cabinet that got sanded today. Stay tuned for more tomorrow. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.

Day Six-o-five: garage complete

We finished up the garage last weekend so have been remiss about updating you. With the floor, door, and trim painted; the sink and backsplash installed; and all the tools in their places with bright shiny faces we can consider it done.

We had the folding table already in the garage and a couple chairs in storage in the basement, so we decided to put them together, although we're a bit at a loss as to what sorts of meetings we plan to hold there.

The black plastic items on the floor are table legs for what will be a new work table. The company makes a wide range of products for the home maker.