Moving Cabinets and New Appliances

There are a multitude of projects that I need to work on in this house. Fixing supports in the basement, foundation cracks, water leaking, etc, none of those will make the house look better. Just safer. Meh.

Instead of dealing with those minor issues we decided the first thing we needed was to do was replace the old appliances. Normally old appliances wouldn't be an issue but we had a bad experience with an old exploding gas stove before and didn't want to repeat the process. Also I pulled the handle off the freezer the first time I tried to open it...

Oops. Hulk Smash.

In addition to needing to replace appliances that looked hip in the 90s there was something missing from our kitchen. Great amount of cabinet space, nicely slanted counter tops, but no dishwasher. First world problems.

Also a bookshelf on the island

The stove I call Mr. Burns

Thus we embarked upon removing the cabinet next to the sink. I decided to pull the old switcheroo and put the cabinet under the island and then move the bookshelf next to the sink. It took a little work because the cabinets were attached to the counters with what can only be considered the strongest adhesive ever. For that we needed to enlist the help of a friend who 'has a tool for that'. Things went well until we started to move the cabinet and it did not. Congratulations, we found the air vent that was installed under the cabinet. This is when we learned that the people who installed these cabinets thought duct tape was for duct work.

You almost can't see the improperly installed ducting under the cabinet.

Best way to deal with stuff like that is to just rip it out and throw the sharp hacked piece of metal away. We figured we could just cover up the vent with the bookshelf and deal with it later. This is what impatience gets you.

Bookshelf didn't fit so we just cut part of it off.

What we didn't anticipate was just how sloped the floors were. We knew there was a bit of a slope, you can feel it when you walk. It is as though you need sea legs to navigate our house. I fear my children will grow up to be pirates, unable to walk on land without staggering around like they can't hold their grog.

Best use for drill bit sets; spacing for counters.

I built a handy frame to deal with the space between the cabinet top and the island figuring that a set of 2x4s would work just fine. The inch and a half slope from the left side of the cabinet to the right disagreed. Luckily an inch and a half is the exact width of a 2 inch by 4 inch piece of wood. What is that you say? A 2x4 is surely 2 inches by 4 inches. What manner of witchcraft is this that a 2 inch piece of wood fits snugly in a 1.5 inch space?

The lumber industry hates us. Turns out Paul Bunyan thought it would be fun to start cheating people out of half an inch of wood so he could get more cuts from a single tree. America started a campaign against the lumberjacks, but their slogan was the downfall of the movement. 'We want the full 2 inches of wood!' just didn't rally the troops the way they hoped. Now we meekly accept that when we ask for a 2x4 we are getting a 1.5x3.5 piece of wood while the dude at the lumber mill sneers at us.

No more drill bit box stand and if you look closely, level!

The only way to deal with the slope was to hide it. I feel like this will be a recurring theme in a lot of my repairs, hide the problem. So I put some nice pre-primed wood around the edges and unless you are looking at it, you can't even tell that the floor is a low grade slide.

The final part of the project was to deal with the particle board backing of the cabinets. The original plan bounced between adding a Formica backing, painting it white, ripping the whole kitchen out and burning it in the driveway; but we settled on magnetic primer underneath chalkboard paint. Might as well make a play area for the kids.

The dishes wash themselves!

The wee-one already loves ripping the magnets off the board

For now the kitchen is complete. New appliances, migrated cabinets, hidden sloping, chalkboard. I think its time to deal with the rest of the house.

- The Porter -