Kitchen Cabinetry

He says:

So, there are about a million ways to do kitchen cabinets.  You can have custom cabinets made, you can order ready-to-assemble cabinets from the web, you can order mass-produced cabinets from a variety of retail stores...but do any of those solutions sound like us?  Nope.  We have to do things on a budget and we want the house to be unique.  

So, we located the wholesale cabinet outlet in our area.  Fantastic people.  They have in-house credit and they have every possible size of cabinet - as long as you want unfinished oak.  Well, we did want unfinished oak.  Like the rest of the house, our skills are more "paint grade" than "stain grade" so we knew we wanted a unique and high-quality paint finish, and we knew we'd be doing that ourselves.  

We obtained a cabinet size list from the outlet store and went home to design our dream kitchen.  We actually did this sitting at the card table in the temporary kitchen.  We made an accurate drawing of the available space and tried about a dozen different layouts to get exactly what we wanted.  We kept the stove, fridge, and sink on one end of the room and went whole-hog for storage with the rest of it.

She Says:

They actually had a lot of different semi-custom choices for the cabinets.  We put a lazy susan in the corner cabinet, and ordered a few of the upper doors without the plywood face so that we could install our own glass.

He Says:

The unfinished solid oak cabinets are sturdy, with thick face frames and 1/2" and 5/8" hardwood ply sides and backs.  They come with hidden euro-hinges and we added our own soft-closers for $3.00 per door.

To install the lower cabinets, we scribed a level line on the wall with our long level and a pencil, and installed the cabinets with 3" screws into the wall studs.  We clamped the lowers together and screwed them together through the face frames with 2" screws.

In the corner of the kitchen we installed an 8' tall pantry unit.  We had to trim it about 1/4" to fit between the floor and ceiling.  

Uppers were installed with multiple 4" screws into wall studs, and face frames clamped and screwed together with 2" screws.

One thing we couldn't purchase was a cabinet to contain the fridge, so we built it from scratch.  We used a Kreg brand pocket-screw tool to assemble the face frame and finish-nailed and glued the face frame to the 3/4" hardwood ply cabinet box.  Viola, we had a refrigerator cabinet that looks so fine.  

She Says:

And the moment of truth: the fridge slid in perfectly into its cabinet, with no room to spare!