Kitchen Renovation - Part 2

In my previous blog post, I shared a picture of my kitchen wall where my oven sits. Today I am posting some updated pictures that include the new cabinet boxes I created to fit in this space. I have always been pretty crafty and not afraid to learn new techniques with new materials. And while I have done a moderate share of woodworking, I have never done cabinetry...until now. 

My dilemma was that I am keeping and refacing the original kitchen cabinets. They have their own unique depth, height, drawer size, etc, that can't be found in prefabricated cabinet boxes. This particular area of my kitchen is also only 16" deep which is pretty shallow for your average cabinet. In exploring my options, I knew that I couldn't buy stock cabinets, and even though I could get the correct width and depth via online stores that made semi-custom cabinet boxes, the final product would not have matched the other dimensions of the existing cabinetry. It seemed that I had two choices...1) hire a carpenter to make custom cabinets for me, or 2) teach myself enough cabinetry to make my own custom cabinet boxes. I chose option 2.

Below is the first of two cabinet boxes created by me. I took a TON of measurements to get everything just right...match the height and placement of the drawer, match the depth of the kick plate. Luckily for me (and not so luckily for anyone else who tries to assist me), I'm painfully meticulous. This cabinet is far from perfect, but it works and isn't half bad for a first try.

Here is my second cabinet box. I feel like I learned from my mistakes and was able to make this one a lot more precisely and much more quickly. And I'm excited about the future drawer space since I don't have much drawer space in the existing cabinets.

And here is a picture of the entire wall with both cabinets installed around the stove. They may not look like much from the picture, but it is pretty remarkable how much more room I feel like I have in the kitchen even though I took up some of the precious floor space.

My goal from the beginning, besides making the kitchen more functional, was to recreate what I think used to be in the kitchen based on the floor and wall marks. I hired a local company to reface my original cabinets and counter top, and when they do that they will face these new cabinet boxes as well so the final product should look identical between the old and the new boxes. Here's hoping it all comes together well in the end.