Kitchen Renovation Update

[Pete Brown]

Can I just say that one's first "real" woodworking project should probably not be a kitchen full of cabinets :)

This project has taken *forever* due to a toddler and the hours I keep at work. Basically I get about half a day each, averaging around 3 weekends a month for 1 1/2 days total work each month in a shop - a shop that can only hold one partially-completed cabinet at a time (including finishing)

Of course, the most I got done was when I took two weeks vacation in September. :)

Anyway, I did my first ever frame and panel a week or so back. This is the door to the pull-out waste basket.

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The flash makes the tiger pop more than it does when you're in the kitchen. The open top will have a 5" drawer. It's one of the only ones where I put a plywood divider in there as I wanted the trash compartment fairly well sealed.

I took an unorthodox approach to the doors. My wife didn't like any of the shaker-style cope and stick profiles. In the end, the thing she liked was having a 5/8" thick panel set 1/8" back from the front of the frame, with no profile to anything other than to break the edges a bit.

I routed stopped grooves using a regular tongue and groove cutter then rabbeted the backs of the panels to fit. The rails and stiles are joined using 8x50 dominos.

Here are some other photos.

The microwave cabinet (doors not in place yet on either cabinet) with the leg in place. Againk the flash makes things look a lot busier than they do in person. I really need to get enough light in there to take a non-flash photo.

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And here is the double-deck cutlery drawer that CCF built for me. I'm going to flip the top drawer around I think as I would prefer the horizontal section to be in the back

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Here's one of the cabinets showing how the face frames are on edge rather than the usual way. I really like the look of this, but it doesn't offer much rigidity to the cabinet, especially if the plywood has a tendency to wander like this stuff does.

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None of the base cabinets are permanently installed yet. They all still need the green toekick boards as well as the legs and the curved toekick rails in place.

Finish on everything is 3 coats of zinsser seal coat followed up by 3-4 or more coats of General Finishes high performance polyurethane water-based finish.

I'm happy my wife has been as patient as she has been. Between the floors, walls, windows, stairs, doors and kitchen, I've had parts of the house torn up since 2005. I know she'll be happy once we can get the base done enough to get the countertop people in to measure.

I still really enjoy the project, but I'm looking forward to working on something that doesn't involve 4x8 sheets of plywood and a full flitch of maple :)

Pete

[John Renzetti]

Hi Pete, It's looking good! And I do agree that a complete kitchen renovation is probably not the best choice for a first project. Your wife does get sainthood status for having a torn up house for so long. I'm planning on a similar project when I return home in a few months and finally go into the retirement mode. I'll probably ask for some tips.
take care,
John

[Jamie Baalmann]

Looking good... Her patience is really paying off.

[Skyp Nelson]

Very Nice. I did a set of doors this year and it was really a learning experence.

[John Viercinski]

What material did you use for the inside/cases of the cabinets? Are they painted or just polyed?

[Ralph Okonieski]

Cabinets look great ! Hang in there.

[Pete Brown]

What material did you use for the inside/cases of the cabinets? Are they painted or just polyed?

Hi John

The wood inside the cabinets is 3/4 plywood: maple one side, birch on the other. I use the water-based poly on the maple side as the show face inside the cabinets. They contrast with the soft maple frames and drawers in a way that I actually find attractive.

I picked it up at Lowes.

I strongly recommend against this stuff, as it was never dried properly and every piece has a bow, sometimes a twist developed just from acclimating in my house. The pieces aren't consistent in width even across the same sheet. The veneer is extremely thin and prone to coming up on the edges and splitting at the seams.

The plywood has been the most trying part of the cabinet construction. I had to get something like 20 sheets, so I tried to both save time and money by getting it locally (I have yet to have a good experience with truck delivery to my house). It wasn't worth it, even at the $40 a sheet it cost. The brand was "Sam Ling USA" (take the USA with a very large grain of salt)

I need to find a good place to get hardwood plywood in Maryland (or nearby PA). I know of several hardwood lumber dealers that I use for solids, but for ply, I'm stuck with the big box stores.

I'd love to say "you get what you pay for", but the one hardwood lumber dealer nearby that actually stocks hardwood plywood has their stuff stored in conditions that have caused it to bow and twist too, and at 3-4x the price.

Pete

[Mike Vermeil]

[I strongly recommend against this stuff, as it was never dried properly and every piece has a bow, sometimes a twist developed just from acclimating in my house. The pieces aren't consistent in width even across the same sheet. The veneer is extremely thin and prone to coming up on the edges and splitting at the seams.]

I have had the same trouble, mostly with birch & maple plys from overseas. I had to return about 15 sheets last year. It's OK for shop cabinets, etc, but for everything else you're much better off to pay the price for higher quality stuff from North America.

[Pete Brown]

Here's the jig I made for routing the legs. It works for the top legs and also for the bottoms, even though they are somewhat different.
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And here are the legs waiting for me to put in the inlays. The two cross pieces and the long piece down the middle are cherry, and the four squares at the top are ebony. I cut the square holes using my mortiser, but the cuts are very messy. I'm hoping that having the ebony plugs just a hair oversize will help hide that a bit.
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The legs are deliberately loud as the frame members and the door rails and stiles are relatively tame. This tie in with the panels.

As you can imagine, with all this wood activity, we're going with a fairly tame, dark, countertop. :)

I like the idea of the cherry inlays in the wood, but I am a bit disappointed at the lack of contrast. Typically cherry contrasts well with maple, but this is a red maple that is very close to cherry in coloration (even after I let the cherry sit in the sun) as you can see in the leg shot in the first post. Had I known that going into it, I would have made them out of ebony or something else with strong contrast.

Pete

[Steve Clardy]

Looks very nice Pete ;)

[Ed Falis]

Pete,

I really like the personal look of the design elements you used. You're going to wind up with something really special there, I think. I'm slowly building our kitchen cabinets myself, though it's been "buildus interruptus" for a few months due to unrelated issues. Using horizontal bamboo plywood for most of the visible stuff, some vertical bamboo, and birch ply for the rest. Frameless design because I like the look of it.

Keep on pluggin' and postin'

- Ed

[Pete Brown]

Pete,
I really like the personal look of the design elements you used. You're going to wind up with something really special there, I think. I'm slowly building our kitchen cabinets myself, though it's been "buildus interruptus" for a few months due to unrelated issues. Using horizontal bamboo plywood for most of the visible stuff, some vertical bamboo, and birch ply for the rest. Frameless design because I like the look of it.

Keep on pluggin' and postin'

- Ed

Very cool! How do you like the bamboo?

The floor in the photos above is all strand bamboo that I put down. When it splinters, the splinters are nasty, but it's pretty nice otherwise (and hard as a rock)

Thanks for the kind words

Pete

[C Scott McDonald]

That's awesome. It is a lot of work but know you can go to Lowes and chuckle at the Cabinets they have for sale.

[Rob Mathis]

Very nice, I love my Maple.

I have a kitchen to do as well!

But first things first. I have a Zebrawood mantle to make.

[Ed Falis]

I'm using two kinds of plyboo: a cross laminated horizontal grain for most of the show surfaces, and single-direction vertical for some of the trim. They're both very pretty (carbonized). The cross-laminated stuff is stable, the vertical is a bit iffy. We're still expecting it to come out very nice.