The Kitchen: Part Three – Cabinets
When our house was new it had modest cabinetry, including a hutch that sat in the southeast corner. At some point in the past (I would guess the 1970s) that cabinet was eliminated, and new cabinets were installed along the south wall to the left of the door. The upper cabinets were tall, with four doors – two big, two small. By the time we bought the house, the two small doors were gone, making for what appeared to be high shelves above cabinet doors. Below was a base cabinet with about four linear feet of counter top. It had one large door, behind which we kept pots and pans, and one false door that allowed it to have four drawers at one end. When Miriam designed her dream kitchen, this whole cabinet and counter would cease to be, much as the old corner cabinet ceased to be.
The rest of the cabinets, along the west wall, boasted precious little counter space. Indeed, between the twenty-four inches of counter top to the lest of the sink, the six inches between the sink and the stove, and the sixteen or so inches to the right of the stove, there wasn’t much room to prepare food. The chief obstacle to creating more counter space was a hallway opening to the right of the stove. We had ceased to use this hallway, since the bedrooms and bathroom are accessible through the living room. And, curiously, there was no hallway there when the house was constructed. A refrigerator would have gone there, and on the other side of the wall behind the fridge would have been a furnace. Earlier this year I closed in that hallway, making a closet on one side, and wall space on the other where I could install new kitchen cabinets, and dramatically increase counter space.
The first step in installing new cabinets is to remove the old ones, and that was, as you might imagine, an ugly business. I am not the sort of fellow you see on HGTV taking a sledgehammer to old cabinets. That’s rookie crap. It is much better to disassemble what you can whole, and carry out large pieces than it is to break everything to bits. What made my job ugly was that there was a good deal of rot in the old base cabinets near the sink. The particleboard components were disintegrating, and there was a good deal of nastiness to be found under and behind things. The upper cabinets were, somewhat surprisingly, assembled in one long, heavy piece. I removed the screws that held it on the wall, and down it came with a great bang. It took two people to carry it from the house. The removal of the old cabinets left me with a room that looked like one of the houses in Whoville after the Grinch stole everything but a few pieces of wire.
Once the old cabinets were out I set to work on installing the new flooring and hanging wallpaper – both of which I have already described here. Then I could begin to install the new cabinets.
What cabinets to buy? That was the question. Miriam had long considered cabinets from Ikea. They come in a variety of styles (with Ikea, and other manufacturers, too, the cabinets themselves are all the same; the door determines the style), and are highly configurable. Plus, they have a clever hanging system that seems like it would greatly ease installation versus the traditional method. Also, they are very affordable. Miriam and I must have looked at Ikea kitchens a million times, and she spent–no exaggeration–years looking through Ikea catalogs trying to find the style that best suited her. Over the years her preferences switched from a dark wood grain finish to all-white. Still, I could tell that she wanted something more.
We had, of course, browsed all the kitchens at the big box home improvement centers. Some of them were quite nice, but tremendously expensive. Many were far too fancy and/or ostentatious. Miriam wanted something simple but elegant.
One day she saw a new line of cabinetry at Home Depot that perfectly matched her style and offered a level of utility that far exceeded anything we were used to, and matched what one can find at Ikea. We made an appointment with the cabinet guy–a friendly fellow named Eric–and he walked us through the whole design process. (From beginning to end, we must have spoken to Eric about a hundred times. Little things come up here and there, and it was great that he turned out to be so nice and helpful.) Miriam selected cabinets in a color I call gray, she calls “taupe”, whatever that is, and the manufacturer calls “Ocean Floor”. It is pleasant, and it looks splendid with the wallpaper.
During the design process we selected the various cabinet and door styles that suited our taste and needs. Some of what we were doing was limited by our room layout. That is, the location of the doors and window affected where we could put things. In some cases I was able to move things to work better for us. The stove, for instance, I moved over a couple feet to give us usable counter space next to the sink. The cabinets are not totally custom. That is, they come in certain standard sizes. For us, this meant that when all was said and done, there would be a couple inches on either end of the room that would need to be filled. Conveniently, the manufacturer provided blank pieces of wood in our “Ocean Floor” color, which I could rip to the proper width and install.
Our total order consisted of a tall pantry to go to the right of the refrigerator; a deep cabinet to go directly above the refrigerator; four tall upper cabinets, one of which has glass doors; one short upper cabinet to go above the stove; one wide lower cabinet with three drawers; one wide cabinet with one drawer and two doors; one sink base that has two short doors and a blank area that designed to be cut away to accommodate an apron sink; various filler pieces and whatnot. I don’t remember how much it cost. Thousands, probably.
Miriam bought this kitchen for the looks and functionality. I was more concerned with the quality and made-in-USAness. When we finally placed the order, after a long process involving computer programs and repeated measuring on my part, the order was sent off to a factory somewhere in the Carolinas. Several weeks later, while we were at Disney World a totally not prepared, I got a phone call saying, “we’re bringing your kitchen tomorrow”. When the truck arrived the next day, the two guys unloaded what seemed like a million enormous boxes and wheeled them into the house. Whereas Ikea cabinets come with some assembly required, these cabinets came ready-to-hang, with all the hardware and doors installed. That saves time, but it also meant that I had to make room to put a whole kitchen’s worth of cabinets somewhere other than the kitchen, which, at the time, still had the old, asbestos-tainted floor awaiting removal. I spent at least six hours unpacking the boxes and inspecting the cabinets and doors. In the entire order, only one item was damaged, and a quick phone call to Eric resulted in the arrival of a new, perfect glass door within a week or so.
While I was dealing with the floor tiling and wallpaper hanging, the cabinets just sat still, blocking access to important things like compact discs and computer printers. But when the floor was finally down and grouted, I began moving the cabinets into the kitchen. They were heavy.
It seemed logical to install the upper cabinets first while I had plenty of room to work below. Unlike Ikea cabinets, with their clever metal cleat, these cabinets get screwed into the studs from within, using three-inch cabinet screws with a wide head and a square drive. But you have to keep them in place somehow while you drive the screws in. The best way to deal with this is to install a temporary shelf to support the weight of the cabinets while you secure them to the studs. I just used a 2′x4′ stud. I got some help lifting from my friend Kyle.
One problem was that studs weren’t always where I needed them to be, especially at either end of the run of cabinets. This is because the edges of the end cabinets fell three inches from the end of the wall, and, therefore, missed the studs by about three inches. To ensure the cabinets were properly supported, I opened up the walls on either end of the room and installed extra studs. That worked fine.
Before the cabinets were tightened down to the wall, I screwed the face frames together to ensure a tight fit with no gaps. A counter-sink bit ensured that the screw heads were flush with the cabinet frames.
Installing the base cabinets was mostly easier, if only because they support their own weight. The only real challenge was ensuring that everything was level. I screwed the face frames together as I did with the upper cabinets.
The one exception to the above rule was the base cabinet for the sink. Miriam had selected an apron sink, sometimes called a farm sink. These look cool, but require a huge amount of work. Obviously, for the apron sink, a panel had to be cut out of the front of the cabinet. This was an intimidating prospect for me. I had to use a circular saw and make several plunge cuts. But I made myself a jig and it all worked out. The sink base also, of course, needed to have holes cut in the back for the drain pipe and the water supply pipes. To make the holes line up precisely, I crafted a jig. This was especially important in this instance because the drain pipe comes out of the wall at an angle. I couldn’t just push the cabinet back up to the pipes and mark where they touched, because if I did, everything would be off about an inch. But I got it just right, and was very happy with the results.
The pantry and cabinet surrounding the refrigerator were also challenging to install. They had to be positioned just so, and getting the face frames all tight and flush was tough. But once in the fridge fit perfectly.
Next: countertops and island.
Filed under: House on July 21st, 2011 | No Comments »
