Where do we begin? Existing Conditions

Existing Conditions

Welcome back!! Like I was discussing in the last post, this house was built in 1974. The kitchen has never been updated except for some new appliances. The new appliances are the stainless flavor, but still not enough to dampen the UGLY of this kitchen. The cabinets were site built to fit the space. The doors are plywood and edge beveled so you can actually see the layers in the plywood. These gotta go!
Since I cook so much (or at least did once upon a time) I decided that the kitchen MUST have an island. A nice large space to prepare things, to cut and chop, stir and mix, etc. I wanted some very large pull out drawers, almost tray like, to hold all the pots and pans. The

A New Kitchen - Start to finish, and all from scratch!!!



Rough Stock



Hi there! My name is Harvey and this will be my very first blog. The project at hand is a new kitchen for this house. I am an avid woodworker and decided to build my own kitchen cabinets for the kitchen remodel. A little history of the house. It was built in 1974 and still contains the original kitchen cabinets. They were "site-built" using 1/2" and 3/4" plywood. The doors are even made of PW. For lack of a better definition (or one that is polite) the kitchen is very dated and needs replaced. I put new appliances in here already, nicer stainless ones but nothing too expensive. It still doesnt detract from the "ugly" factor that these cabinets continue to bring to the kitchen. So early on last year I decided to replace the cabinet doors or maybe even paint the existing cabinets. The more I thought about this, the more I knew that I didnt even like the layout of the kitchen. It is NOT very functional and the prep space for cooking is so minimal it makes it a total chore to fix a good meal. So I decided to replace the cabinets and remove one wall (non-load bearing, of course) and add an island to the kitchen. I priced out new cabinets, both off the shelf and custom units. WOW! Was I surprised at the cost. The off the shelf units were more affordable but didnt fit the bill when it came to layout and available sizes. Now the good part! I decided to BUILD my own cabinets! No biggie, right? No, I had never did this before, but how hard could it be? My girlfriend teaches environmental science and ethics, so I needed to be green also. I decided to go with mostly recycled, reclaimed, reused red oak. I was able to purchase a truck load of this lumber from a cabinet shop in Galax VA. Most of the stock was random lengths, 2' to 4', and random thicknesses ranging from 4/4 to 8/4. All of it kiln dried, but rough stock....NO edges had been planed or jointed. No fancy smancy store bought lumber here (except the plywood used for the cabinets carcass's).
Over the next few weeks I am going to outline where I am at right now with the kitchen build and through a multitude of images, illustrate how I designed and built the kitchen cabinets that I will use for the kitchen project.
I welcome any and all comments and questions, so by all means post them at will.
Thanks so much and stay tuned in.....for those of you that are already woodworkers and for those of you that aspire to be or simply want to watch, thanks.
Harvey M.