With the kitchen cabinets done, you may be asking, "What could they be up to now?" We wondered the same thing as we stared at this pile of scrap wood. Is there a project hiding in there?
That pile is a jumble of oak, solid pine, plywood pine, and poplar. We seemed to have the most poplar so went with it. We started by cutting 16 equal pieces on the table saw. Each one is 5x2 inches and 3/4 inches thick.
The size is a little easier to see when they're laid out.
We doubled them up with some Elmer's wood glue, making each piece 5x2x1.5. This is two pairs in the clamp. Trying to economize on the use of clamps.
Here are another two pairs (with an extra piece to absorb the brunt of the clamp) in a new corner clamp that will be useful in future projects to keep things at 90 degrees.
This is another new corner clamp. You can see that we've not only paired off four pieces but glued them together at one end.
Here's a finished version. We might put a small finishing nail through the end to keep the whole thing together, but what are we going to do with four L-shaped pieces? Don't you love a good mystery?
And now we are complete. Or at least our kitchen is with the last piece in place.
For anyone who wants to install their own sink tray, here's the story of what we did today. We started with a hole.
And the puzzle piece that fits into it.
As we have with converting everything else to the inset style, we had to add shims to which we could attach the hardware for the drawer.
What made this more tricky than usual is that we had to work around the sink and the countertop. In a normal kitchen we would have attached all this hardware before installing either, giving us maximum room to maneuver. Alas, we can't go back in time. So we improvised.
Here are the hinges for the drawer front and the shims. The depth was about 1/16 difference so we marked them to make sure we used the correct one on each side.
Then we drilled pilot holes to attach these two together. Unlike what the directions say, we could not attach the hardware to the frame first because we would never have had the space to drill and screw into the drawer front.
We set everything up, unattached, to make sure we weren't making any mistakes. Here's the top-down view of the drawer in progress and a close-up of one side.
Here's how everything looked from the back. The small metal plates in the bottom corners is where the hinges attach to the drawer front.
After drilling six holes into the back of the drawer (four to attach the hardware and two for the tray) we fixed the hinge in place.
Then we turned to making the tray. What you get from the manufacturer is 36-inches long, but we needed only about half that. So after measuring carefully and checking twice we cut this piece down and added the connectors.
Here's the whole drawer front ready to go into the cabinet.
We left the tray off to give us space to screw the hinges into the shims on each side.
Then we added the tray back.
And here's what it looks like closed.
If anyone's interested in trying this for themselves, we highly recommend this brand.
Well we never thought we'd see day #700 when we began this odyssey nearly two years ago. Then again, we had plenty of doubts that we'd ever see the day when the kitchen was (for all intents and purposes) done. Barring a tip-out drawer in front of the sink we are done because we installed the last doors today.
When we think back about what we had to start with we realize just how far we've come. It was all faux-maple over top of the original 60-year-old cabinets...
ceramic tile laid on top of the original vinyl floor...
black appliances...
separate (gas) range and built-in oven...
and a little breakfast table.
After many permutations and false starts--installing maple floor, several different layouts, numerous colors of stain and then paint on the cabinets, a few colors of paint on the walls--we had what to many seemed like a perfectly fine kitchen.
But fools that we are we thought differently and are very pleased with the result.
As we push this boulder up the hill and hope that this time it doesn't roll back on us, we made some really good strides today on the kitchen cabinets. At the end of a full day here's where things stand.
For those of you who want to see what went into the picture above here's a bit of a step-by-step recap. First, you survey the doors. This was the second of three batches.
Then you mark where the hinge should go to make sure that they're in the same place on all the doors. Foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but it sure does look better.
Then drill pilot holes.
When attaching the hinge we wanted to make sure that we were as standardized as possible, so we used a ruler to keep us on track. Our target was to put the center of the hinge 4 1/8 inches from the end.
Once we had the hinge lined up we secured it in place. The worst part was driving the screws into the hard maple door. You're probably thinking "With so many screws and lots of repetition that's a perfect job for a power screwdriver." Well, it might except that power screwdrivers and hard woods tend to result in stripped screws. We didn't want to do that in case we needed to loosen and adjust the placement of the hinges.
We had to put the doors up on blocks when putting on the hinges because this style hangs below the door.
The process for attaching the handles was similar. Mark the holes (the little X toward the bottom).
Drill the holes.
And here's the final door ready to attach to the frame.
This starts like the stages above. Mark the height for the screw and center it.
Drill a pilot hole.
Our approach was to drill only two of the four holes and put those screws in tight. This allowed us to set the door in the opening the way we wanted it and avoided having to mark four holes.
Once firmly in place we drilled the other two holes and added screws.
Here's the final result (once we added the clasps).
