Kitchens

There's been quite a few awkward moments of me peeking inside kitchen cabinets to get to this point. And I'm not interested in what type of peanut butter my friends like, or how they store their canned goods.  I've been on a quest to find a way to build strong, high quality kitchen cabinets for less than flat pack - that mind you, you still have to "build" anyways - with simple tools and standard off the shelf materials and basic techniques.  Techniques that I can do, that most anyone

Well .... Mom likes the kitchen plans!

So let's just say you got a team of two building a kitchen, and one hates painting and the other can't paint.

Well, it's not that I couldn't paint.  They say occassional painting in a well ventilated area is fine for pregnant women.  

But up here in Alaska, in the cold winter months, working inside a poured in place concrete building, with no ventilation, where your full time job is to build and paint or stain furniture, it's not occassional and it's not well vent

So what is the most intimidating part of building your own kitchen cabinets? 

Apart from the huge scope of the entire project, I'd have to say building and installing easy to use drawers can seem very intimidating.  Kitchen drawers get used dozens of times a day, so you want drawers that are both easy to use and will hold up over years of use.

For the Momplex white kitchen, we decided to use a drawer side/slide combo system, call Metabox drawers by Blum.

My friend Kate made me a believer.

When it came time to install a countertop for the Momplex Vanilla kitchen, we did go have a solid surface countertop priced out.  

The cost of the solid surface countertop was MORE than the entire kitchen!!!  And it would take 8 weeks and we'd have to pay for a full travel day each time someone drove to the site to measure, fit and install the countertop (yes, we are to blame there for living in the sticks in Alaska).

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Seven sheets of PureBond plywood and $200 in popular boards.

Yep, that's what it took to take this blank space ....

And turn it into this:

Well, at least to build all those cabinets!

I'd love to know how to make a dishwasher out of plywood, but I'm going to stick to cabinets for now.

The Ram and I spent about a week building the cabinets, and honestly, the building was the easy part.  Once we got all th

After a couple of weeks of building kitchen cabinets and finishing them, I can't tell you how excited and eager I was for this day to come ...  Kitchen cabinet installation day!!!

Yep, this blank space is going to be a kitchen after today!

We are going to do the wall cabinets first.

First, we mark the height of the bottom of the wall cabinets.  Standard height is 54".

But we can't just mark 54" and pull a string line,

Hi everyone!

I'm really excited today to share with you how we installed crown moulding on top of the wall kitchen cabinets - finishing out the seam between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling.  

But before we get to that - don't forget - today's the day! 

The Home Depot Do-It Herself Workshop - featuring a storage trunk plan designed by me (it super simple so very beginner friendly) is happening tonight!!!

You can re

Whether you buy kitchen cabinets or you DIY them yourself (I'm totally on team DIY here!) I think the biggest difference maker in how professional looking your kitchen cabinet ends up appearing is in the tiny little details.  In other words, after you hang your cabinets, you aren't done quite yet.

After installing all the kitchen cabinets for the Momplex Vanilla Kitchen, there's a few little things that will make a big difference to take care of.

The most obvious one is finis

Shall we talk kitchens? I've been promising you that we will make real kitchens for the Momplex, and blogging the tutorials and plans.  Every since the day I spent $7000 on cabinets for a 10x10 kitchen, I've been tossing and turning at nights, thinking, I could have made my own cabinets.  I've been thinking I could have made my own cabinets much easier, much simpler ... because it was quite a chore just installing the cabinets.On the Momplex, we have two kitchens, and we will be bui

I remember back when we used our Get Out of Jail Free card on the Momplex, and I dreaded receiving comments about hiring help and taking a step off from DIY.

But you totally suprised me.

Instead, many of you commented that a good DIYer knows when to DIY, and when to seek help.

The primary reason we hired out the drywall finishing is tool investment.  In order to tool up to do two homes worth of drywall, we'd be into it about as much as the cost of hiring

Mom, we love you, but not this much.  There are trusses delivered and sitting up at the Momplex right now.  And nobody wants to see that roof go up more than me, but with temperatures in the heat of the day rising to "extreme cold" with a feels like temperature of -26 degrees below zero, even if we did love our Mom's enough to work regardless of the weather, our tools don't love Mom that much.  At these temperatures, air compressors act funny, nailers don't nail, drill batterie

With the doors painted, it's time to take this -

And turn it into this -

Pretty crazy how just installing doors over cabinets can do that, isn't it?

The doors we ordered are measured for full overlay, and will require a Euro Style Concealed Hinge, 1-1/4" (sometimes referred to as Full Overlay), Face Frame.  

Full Overlay means the doors pretty much cover the entire cabinet - there's a 1/2" gap between all doors and

I wish I could say we are one roof closer to Mom moving into the Momplex. But we are instead dealing with record smashing cold in Interior Alaska, according to the Washington Post, my toes, and any other exposed skin as I run from the house to the garage.And we are not one roof closer to building two homes for our Moms.  Not today.  But we are also NOT $2000 closer to being out of money to keep working on the Momplex.  You know this crazy Momplex dream is what keeps me driving

Truth is, we didn't hang 20 yesterday.

We actually only hung 18. 

We were dreading the last two.  Can you guess what two doors I'm referring too?

Yep, you guessed right!  

The lazy susan we built for the corner will require two doors, hinged together with multiple different hinges.

You can buy the whole kit, or buy the hinges separately, as we did.

Image from Hardware Source

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I've been dreading writing this post. This is not easy.I hope you understand that we are real people, working with real limitations on a budget, and there is no midnight crew making things happen magically. It's just us, one family, trying to build two houses in one for our Moms. We have been waiting and waiting for a break in the weather to put the roof on the Momplex. The trusses are sitting there, ready to shed snow, if we could just get a week of no snow, no wind, and decent temperatu