This cabinet is the one above the fridge, and has a finished side that fits tight to the wall and flush to the door on the front. It gives the door a bit more room to swing open before hitting the wall. I measured the inside corner of my walls with a bevel gauge and transferred that angle to the cabinet. You can see how out of square the walls were. I intended to use my belt sander to remove the material but once I had it scribed and saw how much sanding there would be, I took the piece off and used my bandsaw. Resawing 12" of plywood on the bandsaw was no fun and completely did in a new blade. Sorry, I didn't take an 'after' shot.
Here's my sweet set up for holding the cabinets in place while scribing - a shitty wood box on a ladder. Textbook! This is my 'blind corner' which hides the transformer for the undercabinet lights. The wall that this cabinet is mounted to is a tad out of plumb so after getting it mounted I had to scribe and sand the corner piece so it would fit tight against the other cabinet.
Over the 36" height of the cabinet this totalled about 3/16" of difference top to bottom.
After scribing the plumb line I removed the bulk of the waste with a belt sander. I 'heart' my belt sander.
Once I had it close to the line I switched to a jointer plane to ensure it was straight. It always seems kinda blasphemous to handplane plywood, like farting in church. Well, I've never actually been to church... or farted.
It's nice to have these on the wall and out of the way. Space is at a bit of a premium it seems. I'll try to get the microwave cabinet (which is going to the left of the window) put together this week and then I'm going to take a break from cabinets to get some other stuff done in the house.
3 comments:
that is going to be one awesome kitchen! great stuff!
We just had the "custom" kitchen installed on the Island house I'm working on. Man, they were just particle board boxes stapled together for like $30 G's! You did the right thing by making your own, they looks kick ass Cody. You have definitely inspired me.
Thanks guys, I appreciate the support. It's funny what gets called 'custom' in the kitchen cabinet world. My parents built a big new home in 2002, and they really spared no expense. There's two cabinet makers in town here, one is less expensive and has a pretty much fully-automated shop. CNC machine, automated glue spreaders and assembly, etc etc. The other guy is more expensive but is touted as 'hand-crafted'. My parents kitchen is actually smaller than mine, with only one small wall cabinet. It also cost $30,000 (including granite countertops though). So when I was designing my kitchen I was doing some reverse engineering on my folks kitchen and was surprised to find that the hinges and drawer slides are the cheapest available, the 'solid edges' are all the cheap adhesive type, and the drawer boxes are butt jointed and stapled, no joinery whatsoever.
Don't get me wrong though, I've been completely overwhelmed at the amount of work building a kitchen has been. I still have a shit-pile of work left to do, and I'm sure if I was to charge by the hour this kitchen would be worth a friggin' fortune. I also think 95% of the population couldn't tell between veneer ply and melamine cases, or fake wood adhesive edges or a solid wood burgess edge.
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