The New House... #7: Kitchen? Check.

Ok, so now that the holidays have cooled down a bit, and I’ve got a bit of time to catch up on this, I figured I’d jump back in and document where we’re at…

When we last saw our intrepid home refurber, the kitchen was getting prepped for cabinets and floors… let’s see how it went, shall we?

After ripping up the rotten floors, of course the next step was to re-build them and get it all leveled:

Once I had rebuilt the floor sections, the room was cleared and cleaned, ready for installation of the cabinets.

By this time, the floors were in the middle of being refinished, and cabinets had been delivered:

I had already laid out the locations of all the cabinets, however when I primed the walls, of course those layout lines disappeared… so they needed to be re-done.

I spent a full day on the kitchen (that is to say, a full 16 hour day!). Having never hung cabinets before, I was learning as I went. All things considered, it went very well. I also had nobody around to help, and the wall cabinets were 36” high to maximize the available cabinet space, so hanging the wall cabinets was a challenge. I attached 1×3 furring strips to the studs to rest the bottom of the wall cabinets on, and went to work.

Prep was key… using a diagram, I identified each cabinet box, numbered in the order they would be installed, and stacked them (in order) the adjoining three-season porch. I unpacked the first cabinet…(not the first to be installed, but a small drawer unit… I had to see what they looked like!)

The first base cabinet in place…

And so on…

For the cabinet over the fridge, I had to build a jig to support it…

Countertops were next:

Then the range hood:

I was able to get the whole thing done in a day… which was amazing considering that all this was interspersed with a visit from my father, appliance deliveries, floors being refinished, and coordinating the yard cleanup(with the help of a couple of entrepreneurial neighborhood kids!):

They filled 42 (Forty Two!) of those leaf bags!

Having never done a kitchen, I was very pleased with the end results…

I did make one rookie mistake… when marking out the locations of the range and adjoining cabinets, I installed the drawer unit with the back of the cabinet flush with the layout line, neglecting to account for the additional 1/4” face frame. Since the back wall had EXACTLY enough space for the cabinets I had selected, there was basically zero wiggle room, which meant that I ended up having to trim the face frame of the two cabinets on either side of the range to be flush with the carcase itself… Using a jigsaw on brand new, expensive cherry cabinets to get the required clearance for the range was nerve-racking… but I managed to pull it off!

Coming up next: Kitchen floor, and a recap of the work on the upstairs bath.

-- Ryno