Day Six-ninety-eight: looking like a real kitchen

If it's the weekend then it must mean that we're working on the kitchen cabinets. Fortunately we made some good strides today, nearly finishing the long side. All we need over there is to figure out how to make the tilt-out drawer that will go in front of the sink.

Having done a couple doors last weekend these went pretty smoothly, with one exception. For all the single doors we could put the closure clasp on a side. That wasn't an option for the double doors. What to do? We opted to hang the shim and clasps from the center of the cabinet frame above them, basically above where the doorknobs meet.

No problem, right? Well the tricky part was the extra-deep sink, which left us without much room to work with. So we started by making the shim and attaching the one side of the clasps. The pencil mark identifies the center of the shim so we could match it with the center of the cabinet opening.

Here's how it would look as you open the doors.

Our first idea was to do something like our technique with the other shims--drill pilot holes for a couple finishing nails to avoid splitting the wood.

After holding the shim in place we quickly realized that the two straight-on nails were not going to work. We couldn't get the hammer head near them. So Plan B was to repeat the previous step but with angled nails, hoping we'd have more room to work. These 1-inch nails were too small so we tried the same 1.5-inch nails that are sticking out the back.

Unfortunately, even the angled nails were unworkable. It really it cramped quarters in here. So Plan C was to use Elmer's wood glue--which we've found to be a pretty strong adhesive--and clamped it in place for a couple hours. As you could see from the first picture above, everything is in place and working so far.