Day Six-thirty-six: well this is a pickle, part one

Today we decided to install our new upper cabinet. If you read about how others have tackled this you know it's a moderately involved but not overly challenging endeavor. A huge help is to build a box to sit on top of the countertop or a ledger board to keep the cabinet level and take some of the weight while you're installing it. Then installation basically consists of finding the studs and driving screws through the back of the cabinet into them. Easy, right? Well...

Here's what the area looked like as of this morning. About what you'd expect. The cabinet will be a standard 18 inches above the countertop and to the left of the outlet. Our little corner shelving unit will be to the right and above the outlet.

As we thought about how to tackle this something dawned on us. There might not be the usual supports in the wall to which we could attach the cabinet. Why? Because if we step into the wayback machine we'll recall that the space in question used to have a built-in bookshelf above an eat-in table.

You're thinking "So?" Well, we dug up a photo from when the walls were all down and it confirmed our suspicion--right where we want to put the new cabinet there is nothing, nada, zero that we can hang it on. It's just a big empty space where the bookshelf was. Tapping on the wall and using our stud-finder confirmed that no structural boards were added after this picture was taken.

Decisions, decisions. To be continued....