Kitchen Cabinets ...Continued

So, a few posts back i threw in a picture of a bunch cabinet carcasses strewn about in the garage and mumbled something about working on them in my "spare time" ( which mainly consisted of a stolen Saturday every couple of months and some late nights annoying the neighbor with my saw). I have never built cabinets before, and as usual i over built them with all 3/4 construction ( as opposed to the 1/2" you get from most cabinet places as standard). But the face frames are square, the boxes sit level and once finished, most people would never know the difference.

The layout is basically the same, so not a lot of reworking the walls had to be done. We pulled down the soffits, I made the cabinets wider and taller, I made all the drawers larger, in general just more efficient use of the space we had. I raised the uppers so there is some space between the counter top and the cabinets now. I lengthened the sink base and added a larger cabinet above the refrigerator. the trash is now in a cabinet instead of out for all to see. We took down the cabinets above the sink to open the space up a bit ( and man did that make a difference!) we are using nice hardware and I added recessed lights under cabinet lighting as well.

Well, as promised Friday night was the start of a very long weekend. Andrew and his friend Blake came up and we went to town. we started at about 8:30 p.m. gutting the kitchen and finally had it stripped bare with the soffits gone buy 3:00 a.m. I owe you guys, Thanks a bunch!

I looked all over for some recent images of the kitchen, but could not seen to find any. Originally the kitchen cabinets were the general oak with 1970's styling, low soffits and a real closed in feeling. When we moved in, we stripped the floor and placed new tile and last year I painted the cabinets to help them along until we could put new ones in. However, the paint job only looked good as long as you blurred your vision and just allowed yourself to see color and not detail...

Here is a picture of the kitchen when we bought the house.

Kitchen getting stripped

Soffits removed and recessed lights going in...

Blake and Andrew earning their keep...

Halfway Done!

I had to get a working kitchen back together so we put the new appliances in (they have been sitting in our garage for over a year!) and I threw down some melamine sheets for temporary counter-tops. The doors and drawer fronts will go on shortly as well as the crown molding and trim, and then we have to find a good cabinet finisher. The picture below is what we envision for a finish. We are looking for granite tops. I bet i could do it myself but i am not sure if trying my hand at granite on a few thousands dollars of stone is a good time to try new things....