Minor adventures in cabinetry

The house I bought was mostly renovated before we moved in with paint throughout, new flooring, and kitchen cabinets but some corners were definitely cut. My favorite example, which has vexed me since I first saw the place, are the kitchen cabinets.

The kitchen cabinets do not meet the stone floor. This is made worse by the fact that the stone stops about a half an inch behind the cabinetry so there’s a second gap casting more shadow. To keep things interesting, this is only a problem on about 2/3 of the cabinetry due to the floor not being level though the counter is.

Every now and then I would mention to Deanna how I really needed to fix this because it was just driving me crazy. Her response was something like, "You’re being ridiculous. If you’d never pointed it out I never would have seen it. It’s fine." My response to her response was something like, "You crazy. Those gaps are the worst thing ever. Ever."

So after a year of hating the cabinets and a couple fruitless trips to Home Depot looking for an easy solution I decided to do the hard solution. I got some nice and true wood (Select Pine) and basically made faceplates for the cabinets. This involved my full range of wood working skillz. There was drilling, planing, sawing, and even a little whittling. My woodshop was the backyard. My workbench was some crates. It was awesome.

I got them shaped so perfectly that there wasn’t even any need to attach them. I stained them and sealed them to match the color as best as I could and then put them in. Magnifique.

But then the second most annoying feature of the cabinets loomed larger. The cabinets weren’t custom built so they don’t quite fill the entire space. That’s no problem, you can just put a custom cut piece to cover up the gap. The cabinet installers did this in two of the five places where it was needed. This was not logically done in the top two spaces, nor the bottom two, nor the left two, nor the right two….nor with a mouse. They fixed the top left and lower middle. It’s like someone looked at it and said, well we better randomly fix 2/5 of this problem really nicely and completely forget about the rest. I don’t know. It confuses me.

So back to the Depot for more Select Pine but this time my workshop (back yard) would not be sufficient. I needed to make a diagonal 3 foot long cut of 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch. A trip out to Neil’s woodshop took care of that. His consists of his much larger backyard, a garage, a patio, and many tools that plug in – unlike mine. More staining and sealing and some inventive attaching and all is now perfect. Oh, I also had to pull out the dishwasher and level it with some shims. The nice bonus there is now the dishwasher door will stay open on its own.

Now I am happy. I ask Deanna what she thinks and she says, "Wow, I didn’t know I really hated that until you fixed it. You are right in all things." That second part I may have heard wrong.