Day Six-ninety-nine: so close

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).