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!

  

I love tools. I love every kind of tool...

He says:

So, although you can definitely save money doing your own labor, you can definitely spend a LOT of money on tools.  I felt somewhat bad about the amount I spent on my saws until I saw a DIY show that featured a house which had $40,000 spent on trim carpentry inside.  Our project has a LOT of trim carpentry inside, maybe these saws weren't such a bad deal after all.

We want craftsman style door and window casings on the house, and that involves a lot of individual pieces of trim per door or window.  You can buy all of the necessary pieces at the lumberyard, but they add up.  The crown molding is a few dollars per foot.  The separator piece is a dollar per foot.  

Or...you can make what you need on a good table saw.  I choose a good, straight 2x4 (about $2 for 8 feet) and I can produce 32-40 feet of molding, sometimes more.  I can get 50-60 feet of separator strip wood from one 2x4.  

Put together with trim nails and white carpenter's glue, the finished casing costs several dollars less if made on my own saw.  Multiplied by the 50 or so casings on the house, the saw is easily paid for.  There, I feel better.

 She Says:

And I get exactly what I want!  Win Win!

She thinks my tractor's sexy.

He says:

So, if you are going to renovate a house in the country and live in it, you are going to have to do some country things...like dig post holes and mow vast swaths of acreage.

We plan on building a front porch, a back deck, and a long fence at the road.  All in all, about 200 post holes will be dug.  We're also committed to mowing over two acres of "yard" out here.  So I went tractor shopping.

I wanted a new one for about 5 minutes, then I saw the prices.  Even a small "garden" tractor that can use a hole digger is about $20,000 without any implements to go with it.  Craigslist, however, had the answer.  This little beauty caught my eye:

It is a John  Deere 4100 tractor that has about 900 hours of use on it.  It runs well, uses diesel fuel, and has passably good tires.  It has the huge bonus of a front-end-loader installed to lift, push, dig and scrape with.  The ad offered it for $8,000 and the address was about 3 miles away from the reno.

Once we arrived, we found the tractor surrounded by every conceivable type of implement we could want, so we offered $9,000 for everything and drove away with the lot.  We got:

Tractor
Front end loader
Dirt bucket for loader
Fork lift forks for loader
Yard mower
Brush mower
Wood chipper
Big garden tiller
Road maintainer blade
Post hole digger
Fertilizer spreader
Sun-shade roof thingy
Rollover protection bar (important!)

That should be everything we need.  A trip to the tractor doctor fixed an oil leak and got it a clean bill of health.  We've used it for everything, including:

Unloading wood and concrete mix for construction
Moving every heavy thing (including a hot tub) into place
Mowing and clearing brush
Pushing our dirt and rubble piles out of the way

I love this thing.  I love it so much I bought a John Deere T shirt to wear when I'm driving it, and I don't normally do things that geeky.  It runs for weeks around here on 5 gallons of diesel and so far nothing has really gone wrong.  Score one for the homeowners.

NOTE:   Little tractors can be dangerous.  Only buy one with a proper rollover bar, and always wear your seatbelt.  They can carry heavy loads for their size, they are tall and narrow, and as a result they can tip.  They are chock full of hot spinning things that can hurt you.  They are awesome and useful and I love them, but treat them with respect.  I can see that I will be writing something similar about ladders, nailguns, electrical wires...

She says:

I have, in my day, dug post holes with a two man post hole digger, mowed vast swaths of yard with an electric lawn mower, and tilled gardens with a hand tiller.  Yes, I absolutely think his tractor's sexy.