Next Come the Doors…

The face frames are nice and glued up and ready to go.  Next thing I want to do is make the doors.  The door style for our kitchen are pretty simple.  Just a nice recessed panel.  They’re pretty cheap to make compared to some door styles, and they look nice too.  We made a couple of doors out of poplar and hard board to get a feel of what we wanted the doors to look like.  It was a little time-consuming, but worth the effort.  I didn’t want to make 20 doors and then find out the style just wasn’t quite right.  I originally wanted to make the panel flush on the back of the door and recessed in the front, but the guys at the lumber shop talked me into the quarter-inch plywood.  I kind of wished that I’d gone with thicker panels, but it all worked out.

First off, I did the standard joining of all the lumber -just like I did for the face frames.  I just oversized everything a little and worked my way down to the right size/length.  Now I skipped an important step that I would pay for later.  Take your time joining stuff.  Give your lumber time to acclimate during the process.  Heck, do it over a couple of weekends if you have the time!  I had noticed that this batch of cherry really bowed as I ran it through the saw when I was rough cutting things.  I actually had the blade bind up so bad on a couple passes that I popped the circuit on the saw more than a few times.  And this isn’t something I’d expect with short pieces of cherry stock.  There was a lot of tension in those boards, and I didn’t take note of that fact as much as I probably should have.  In fact I just went right ahead and got all the lumber to it’s finished size in one day.  It looked great that day, but not so hot the next weekend.  It looked usable, but it was not what I would have liked.

The construction of the doors is as simple as it gets.  Just a dado for the plywood panel, and a couple tenons on the boards to join the side rails and the tops.  Just slide those tenons into the dado’s and away we go!  I started by putting my dado blade on my table saw.  I don’t stack the blades, just a single 1/8″ blade is enough.  You could use the regular blade on your saw, but those don’t cut a nice flat-bottomed dado, and that’s something that will be noticeable when you put your doors together.  Without going into detail, I just set the blade pretty close to the center of my door stile and run it through the saw two times to make sure it’s centered in the stile.  I then just adjust the fence a little at a time (very little) till the plywood I’m using for the recessed panel fits in the grove.  A word of advice -run all your stock at one time to keep it consistent, and double-check the width of your grooves.  I’ve had a couple of sheets of plywood that varied in thickness over the sheet.  Usually the factory edges are a hair thinner.  A really pain in the butt if you don’t figure this out till you’re gluing stuff up.  After this I cut all my stock to length, and then bust out my tennoning jig.  You can get by without this jig, but it really makes your life easier.  Use the scraps of wood that you cut off to get the tennons the right thickness for the slots you just cut.  They should fit snugly but not tight.  Be sure to dry fit all your parts and mark em up so you can tell how things will go together when you glue them up.

The basics of my doors... Nothing fancy here.

Make sure everything fits "before" glue...

Get all that glue whiped off -it's impossible to get out of the cracks later...

Now I mentioned that the wood warped a tad after straightening.  Well it got worse after I put the doors together.  But this is too much typing for one night already.  I’ll go over what I had to do to “fix” them in the next blog entry.

 

Putting the faces on…

So you’ve got your cabinet bodies put together and your face frames all glued up and ready to go.  The next step is easy…  At least it will be if you measured everything down to at least 1/16″ and both the frames and the bodies are perfectly square.  Did I mention how important it was to make sure all your work is square?  Well if it is, the next step in putting your cabinet together is easy.

I’m going to use biscuits to attach the face frames to the cabinet bodies.  There are a lot of ways to accomplish this, but biscuits have a lot of advantages over other methods.  They are strong, they line up your face frames for you, and they’re fast and easy to use.  A biscuit joiner is one of those tools that you might not need to use very often, so buying one might not be worth the money.  However if you have a friend or family member who owns one (like I do) -borrow it.  It’s something that just makes your life easier.

The first thing I did was borrow a page from good ol’ Norm Abrahm’s book of quick cabinet making.  I used a 5/32″ slot cutting bit to cut the slots for the biscuits in the cabinet bodies.  This step just allows me to put biscuits anywhere I feel like on the face frames and I don’t have to worry about lining up my slots with the other half of the joint. The only thing I don’t like about this method is how much wood it removes -Giving you less gluing surface, but I’ve found the joint is still plenty strong.

A 5/32" slot cutting bit set to the proper depth for my biscuit size...

Hard to see the slots in the edge of the plywood, but they're there...

Now this might not be clear just yet, but I designed my cabinets so that the bottom edge of the plywood will act as a door stop on the cabinet door.  Now there is a problem with this design that I’ll go into in a later post, but I’m sticking with it in this cabinet.  We won’t go over exactly how this will work just yet, but it means that I need to band the bottom edges of the cabinets.   Easy enough to do.  Hear are a few pics of the process.

Pre-glued maple edge banding.

Cut it length, and sneak out the wife's iron.

I bought this roller just for doing this. Not a "must have", but nice...

And this handy little tool trims the excess off the edges...

Now we’re ready to pull out the face frame and get it ready to mount.  First I setup the biscuit joiner to the proper position so the edges of the cabinets will be even with the edges of the face frame.

Setting up so the cabinet body will be even with the edge of the face frame mounted to it.

 

Now that it's setup, the face frames are slotted for the biscuits...

I was in too much of a hurry to take any pictures, but next was the glue-up.  I applied liberal amounts of glue the biscuits, the face frames , the cabinet body edges, and clamped everything together.  The biscuits lined up everything perfectly.  You can never have enough clamps!

 

I used those iron weights where the clamps wouldn't work...

Face Frames…

Well the carcasses are done.  As you could see in the last post.  I just roughed out the cabinet, and then cut out for the kicks after everything was together.  Now I don’t know if this will be clear or not, but I cut the kick so it will be 4″ high, and 4″ deep.  The kicks will be faced with 1/2″ plywood, so I’ll cut the cherry panel so that it will cover the side of the cabinet 4″ high and 3&1/2″ deep.  That way the side panel will cover the edge of the kick.  I’ll band the cherry plywood to cover the edge when things are done.  In the picture below -Since none of this will show on the final product.  I just hacked it out real rough.

 

Yeah the cuts are a little rough, but who's gonna know?

 

Next thing is the face frames.  Actually once you get the measurements down, they’re really pretty simple.  There is really just one thing you need to keep in mind, everything needs to be square.  Make sure that your chop saw is set up perfect.  Even a degree off of 90 will throw things off.  Gaps are not OK in a piece of furniture, and that’s what you’ll get if you’re not careful. Now the face frames for my cabinets are 1.5″ wide.  Using that width allows me to make the interiors of the cabinets flush with the face frames (for slides and hinge mounting), and all I need to do is throw another 3/4″ piece of cherry on the exterior to dress it up.  That makes for really thick/heavy cabinets, but they’re pretty straight forward to make.

So now I have this big pile of cherry boards.  The first thing I need to do is straighten out the worst of them a little with a couple trips through the joiner, and then use the table saw to cut everything down a little wider than the finished 1.5″ width that I plan on ending up with.  How close to 1.5″ depends on how straight the boards are.  I also cut all my pieces three or four inches long (for reasons listed later).  Usually I cut longer boards a little wider -knowing they are going to need more passes through the joiner.  I don’t straighten face frame boards in the direction of the cabinets.  Attaching them to the cabinet carcasses will straighten them out in that direction.

Most cherry is sold in 4/4 thickness -hope you have a thickness planer!  You’ll need to plane all your pieces down to 3/4″ (or whatever thickness you choose).  I also use the thickness planer to get all my wood down to the 1.5″ widths that I need.  After joining, the boards will be different widths.  I just put three of four boards on edge, and run them through the planer at the same time.  Normally you wouldn’t run boards through on edge, but sandwiching a bunch together keeps them steady.  Now sometimes you’ll get a little snipe as the boards feed the last couple inches through the planer.  That’s hard to avoid all the time, and that’s why we cut everything a little long -we just cut off the bad stuff.  After all this, we can go through our stack of lumber and cut everything to the correct lengths.

At this point I break out my pocket hole jig.  Kreg makes nice stuff.  Depending on how many cabinets you’re making, you might want to spring for a higher end setup, but their cheaper stuff will do the job just fine.  Pocket holes may seem like “cheating” to some, but man does it make your life easier!  It gives a strong joint quick and easy.

 

Pocket hole jig setup...

Ready for screws...

A little glue...

Use the handy-dandy clamp to hold things together while screwing...

And the most important step -make sure it's square!

Let the glue dry at least 24 hours -longer is better.  I’ve torqued some frames before the glue had time to set and ruined some perfectly good cherry.  Why risk having to make that frame twice?  We’ll let this sit, and once the frame is ready we’ll mount it to the cabinet.

 

The Last Cabinet…

I hope that going over the construction of the pantry will possibly help someone out one of these days in doing their own project.  Now with the readership levels this blog has, this might be a little presumptuous on my part, but maybe someday someone will stumble on the next couple entries and maybe glean a little knowledge from my mistakes.

Let’s start with where I got the basics for my design.  There was a cabinetry book “Furniture & Cabinet Construction” by Andy Rae.  It’s a pretty good book.  It’s served me well over the years on a couple different projects.  Even if you can’t get everything you need from it, the book will at least get you started. However the real inspiration for my cabinets is the man himself -Norm Abrams.  I actually purchased the DVDs from the New Yankee Workshop series where Norm builds some kitchen cabinets for a friend.    Now I didn’t follow his design exactly all the way through, but it’s pretty darn close.  Now it’s not that I didn’t try to change things, but all the bright ideas I had to reduce cost, to make things easier to build, etc…  None of them really worked out.  I didn’t want to stock two or more thicknesses of plywood.  I didn’t want to have to finish the insides of the cabinets.  And I wanted the cabinets to be able to withstand a 9.0 earthquake or a thermonuclear detonation whichever was worse.  Yeah they’re a little “over-built”, but hey, it’s my kitchen!

The basic construction of my cabinets is what is called “face-frame” construction.  In simple terms, this means that the cabinet is basically a carcass (or body) made from plywood, with a dressy wood on the fronts of the cabinets to cover the not-so-pretty edges of the plywood body.  The doors on my cabinets are inset.  This type of door fits flush with the face of the cabinets.  From my experience, this type of door is a lot of work, and I wouldn’t recommend it -unless your wife absolutely is sure that she needs it.  It takes a lot of work to get this style of door to fit just right.  I’ll show you what I mean later.

Now I can’t emphasize enough the importance of good plans.  I thought I had a really good idea of what I wanted, but I drew out plans for each cabinet in detail -lots of detail.  By doing this I accomplished a couple of things.  I got to see what the cabinets would look like before they were made.  This was HUGE!  Maria saw all kinds of stuff that “wasn’t quite right” in what I thought the cabinets should look like, and I was able to correct these flaws before I’d cut up a bunch of expensive wood.  I also found a couple of layout issues.  Something like not taking into the account the thickness of a plywood panel, can make that beautiful cabinet that you just hung on the wall -something that you’ll have tear out and use in the garage later.  Trust me on this one.  I’ve got three upper cabinets that are too shallow to hold our dishes.  They’re not garbage, but I didn’t get to use them in the kitchen.  Yeah, my drawings didn’t save me from that mistake, but they did save me from a lot of others.   I drew my plans on plain old paper.  I would have loved to have done them on the computer, but Sketchup wasn’t around back then, and I couldn’t afford a CAD program.  There are lots of great drawing programs specifically aimed at woodworkers like myself.  I would have loved to have drawn up the cabinets and had a cut-list automatically generated for me, but I just couldn’t afford something like that.  Paper worked for me, but the time you’ll spend erasing and throwing away your mistake drawings should more than justify taking the time and checking out the YouTube tutorials on how to use a nice free program like Sketchup.

The cabinet carcasses or bodies are made of 3/4″ pre-finished maple plywood.  Not cheap stuff, but using this material offeri two things.  Sides for really, really… really strong cabinets, and cabinets that don’t need to be finished on the interior.  This last thing might not seem like that big of a deal.  Especially if you’ve never finished cabinets before, but its a BIG deal.  I’d highly recommend pre-finished plywood for the bodies.  Finishing the outsides of your cabinets will be hard enough without having to crawl around inside of them with a spray gun.  Plus you can use the same material and have almost instantly finished shelves, big bonus!  Anything that you don’t have to spray or brush is a positive in my book.

There are several ways to attach the sides, bottom, and tops of cabinets to each other.  I chose dados, glue, and screws.  Now this might be overkill in some people’s books.  I’ve seen cabinets that were made of particle board and just held together with 50,000 staples, but that’s not how I do things.  At every joint where two pieces of plywood meet, I cut a 1/4″ deep groove in the plywood exactly the thickness of the plywood.  I then slather a decent amount of glue on both edges to be joined.  I clamp my cabinets together at this point.  This might not be totally necessary since the screws will hold the cabinets together with more than enough force, but the clamps help hold everything together and keep everything square until the screws are in place.  I don’t use a lot of clamps on the bodies, but I usually don’t take them off till everything is dry -just to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Now I wasn’t going to go into this, but I gotta get on my soapbox.  Making sure your cabinets are square can’t be emphasized enough.  Having your plywood cut square is a huge help in getting this right, but check those diagonals on the cabinet faces.  Even if those measurements are off by fractions of an inch -it’s not square enough.  Getting this first step right will make the rest of the construction and installation a breeze in comparison to the nightmare you’ll be up against if you don’t pay attention and get this right.

 

Here's the body of the pantry that I'm making...

Closing in on the shelf to wall joint detail...

A good example of that dado joint I was talking about earlier...

A picture of the side to back joint -just in case the first dozen pictures didn't get the idea across...

 

 

Unfinished Business…

I had three panels I wanted to put up to give the kitchen a “finished” look before calling the inspector in for final.  After some consultation with Maria and a neighbor, the decision was that one of the panels would be just plain old cherry plywood, and the remaining two panels would be made to look like the face frames, complete with fake inset doors.  It seemed like a bit much, but I do what I’m told.

The first thing I had to do was buy some lumber.  I had used every scrap of cherry in making the cabinets to this point.  I figured I’d buy all the wood necessary to do the panels as well as the planned pantry.  I needed one sheet of 3/4″ cherry, one sheet of 1/4″ cherry, one sheet of a miscellaneous “darker” faced 1/2″ plywood, and about 25 BF of cherry.  Apparently I forgot about the maple I’d need for the interior of the pantry, but I guess I’ll need to make another trip in the near future.  The bill came to about $300.  Even going with shop-grade cherry for the 3/4″ stuff, it’s always painful when buying this stuff. I tied the plywood to the top of the SUV and took back streets all the way home from Aura Hardwoods =way out in San Jose.

I decided I was going to be clever in designing the fake door panels.  I’d just make a “door” panel, but make the widths of the rails look like the face frames of the cabinets.  Then the doors would just be 1/4″ strips of cherry that I’d lay on the inset and make it look like a door.  Sorry if this isn’t a clear description.  I’d planned on taking some pictures of the setup, but never got around to it.  Now the crux of the problem was cutting a 2″ wide piece of cherry only 1/4″ thick.  Now if I had easy access to buddy Phil’s drum sander, this wouldn’t be too hard, but I only had the table saw.  The thickness planer could have been a backup with some work, but it turns out that two partial passes on the table saw, a couple feather boards, and a well designed push stick was all that was needed.  It turns out that this design was perfect, since as soon as I showed Maria the final product, the concept was vetoed.  It was decided that a simple recessed panel was all that was needed, and the strips of cherry simulating the door were thrown on the wood pile for some future project.

A couple weeks ago I talked about my incredibly ingenious idea of mounting panels and stuff with scary strong rare-earth magnets.  Well I mounted em up.  One side has a magnet, and the other side has a decent sized washer.  (I didn’t have enough magnets to put them on both sides).  Well they don’t work quite as well as I had dreamed.  If you think about it, when two magnets are stuck together, how do you get them apart?  You slide them apart.  Well, when a panel wants to fall off a cabinet -it wants to slide off too…  And that is the crux of my problem.  Luckily the panels are fitted pretty snug, so it won’t be a problem, but trim piece next to the washer is just barely hanging on.  It’s gonna have to be remounted with some other method, but I’m still pondering how I’m going to do that right now.  I’m not throwing in the towel on using magnets for this kind of stuff, but the whole idea needs a little more thought in how it’ll be used in the future.

 

Magnets countersunk into the cabinet carcasses...

 

 

Big washers on the back sides of the panels...

 

 

One panel mounted with magnets/washers -not too shabby!

 

The kicks are all in too.  For this I was looking for some “cherry-like” 1/2″ plywood, but the main requirement for this wood was “cheap”.  The very helpful guy down at Aura pulled out some stuff I’d never seen before that fit the bill.  It would never pass as cherry -except who’s ever gonna be looking at the kicks that closely (other than Maria)?  The kicks aren’t even tacked in at the moment -since they’ll all need a coat of lacquer at some point, but they look good just the way they are.  I’d post some pictures, but hey, a kick is a kick.  Not too exciting.

Now I did get the doors trimmed out, filled, and painted.  And I used a scrap piece of wood for the window sill.  It’s installed, filled, caulked, and painted too.  All I had to do was do a little rounding of the edges with a router and some detailed cuts with a coping saw to get it to fit nicely.

 

Originally wanted to make the sill wider, but this looked better...

 

Next time, I’ll start on what I’m doing with the pantry.  Design, parts, process, etc.  Finishing the cabinets will get put off til two things happen:  the pantry is done and I can afford to spend the money to buy that pressure spray setup that I’ve been eying, but that’s another story.

I swear…

Before I get into what I did in the last couple weeks, let’s start off with the inspection I called for on Friday.  So I’d never called for a final inspection before, and I just assumed it was called “Final Inspection”, but that wasn’t the case.  We had to call for mechanical final, electrical final, plumbing final, and building final.  Who would have guessed?  Well the inspector showed up, right on time, and to my amazement it wasn’t my regular inspector.  This was a huge relief since he’d been the bane of my existence throughout this whole project.  There was never anything that he didn’t at least bad mouth a little.  Looking back, this one guy will cause me to think twice about pulling a permit for anything but major projects in the future.  I basically paid the city $650 to be abused every couple weeks by this guy.  Now if he’d actually been helpful in any way in getting this project on track, I would have had no problems, but for only requiring one change in the whole remodel -it sure was a painful experience.  But the inspector that showed up for my final inspection wasn’t “that” guy, and I was thanking God for this.  He came in, looked around, poked around under the sink, and checked the GFI outlets.  There were a few other things he looked at, but things went well.  The last thing he did was grab our range and tried to shake it around.  “Tried” was the operative word.  The range is fit into it’s opening pretty tight and all his shaking wasn’t really doing much.  So I told him I might be able to save him some work if he told me what he was looking for.  Did you know an anti-tip device was needed on a range in California? (neither did I).  I knew exactly what he was talking about, and I even knew where it was out in the garage.  I told him I’d have it installed in the next couple hours and would call him back out first thing Monday morning.  Well he paused for a second and had me hold up my right hand.  I then had to swear I’d put it in, and he signed off on the inspection on the spot.  That’s it!  The pressure is off!  Good thing too, because the six month extension on my permit was nearly up.  It’s been a year and a half since we started this thing -and that doesn’t even count the nearly 6 months it took me to build the cabinets before we tore things apart.  This project isn’t done, but this is a major milestone for me personally.

I was going to continue this entry with all the stuff that I had to do in preparation for this inspection, but there isn’t a whole lot to tell.  So I’m gonna string that story out a bit by doing it next week.  I’ll have a few pictures by then too, to make it a little more interesting.

One more thing.  I’ve already started making the pantry, and I’ve decided to go into a lot more detail on this part than I have done in the past.  I figure maybe someone could benefit from a more detailed look at how this thing will go together.  It’ll be nice to take the time to take some photo’s of the process.  This was something that I just couldn’t do when I had to build ten different cabinets all at the same time.  The pressure is off…  I can do things with a little more care and time now.

Back splash… Check!

I spent the better half of Sunday grouting.  From my experience with the floor tile part of the project, I was pretty confident in my abilities with this part of the back splash job.  However, I gotta tell you, it isn’t the same thing.  The floor was cake in comparison.  Big 12″ tiles, all laid out on the floor.  Lots of room to work and I had lots of room to move around.  The tile on the wall behind the cabinets was not quite the same.  Small tiles, tight spaces, not much room to get in there to push the grout around, and the kicker -a vertical surface…  When you grout a wall you can’t just plop a big glob of grout on the ground and spread it around at your leisure.  It’s more like, I don’t know, frosting a cake.  A big messy cake where the frosting is building up around the edges of your trowel and falling off of it much of the time.  Now everything looked great in the end, but it was way more work and effort than I had expected.  As usual, I had planned on taking pictures during the process, but anyone whose ever done this sort of thing as an amateur knows -you just don’t have the time.  It’s a race against the clock.  Whether its trying to get the stuff on the wall before it dries, or cleaning out the bucket and tools between batches, or just trying to get it done before dinner -it’s always a race.  BTW:  Did you know that tile places sell caulk that’s colored and sanded?  I was tickled pink when the guy at the tile counter asked me if I wanted some.  Did I!  I applied a small bead at the joint along the counter top to tile edge.  I put it on before the grout, but didn’t go too heavy.  I figured it would keep the grout out of that joint while I was putting it in.  It did the job, but I mangled it a little here and there while I was using a trowel to pick up globs of grout that had fallen on the counter.  I’m going to do a little touch-up on that when I get the chance.

Well the grout looks pretty good to me, and even Maria has given it her “it’s OK” stamp of approval.  Monday rolled around and I started putting in the outlets.  Too bad Maria decided all those outlets and their covers just she had bought just didn’t do it for her.  I only had to pull out three or four .   So it didn’t take too long to remove em.  We drove over to the local Home Depot, and she went in and picked out some new ones while me and the kids waited in the car.  Easy!  I spent the next day putting in the new outlets.  Maria gave it her “its OK” stamp (kind of grudgingly).  They’re not exactly what she wants, but c’mon -they’re outlets!

Just need a switch cover and a window sill on this side...

Already reclaiming the counter for kitchen stuff...

Next I sealed the grout.  We picked up some sealer at the above store -just some run-of-the-mill sealer.  Nothing fancy.  I figure we’ll use the expensive stuff on the floor and granite.  A couple coats of cheaper sealer should do fine for a back splash that won’t see a ton of stuff thrown at it.  I used one of the kid’s little art paint brushes to apply it, and just wiped down the tile for drips as I went along.  I did a couple coats, and did extra behind the sink and the range, since those places will probably need it more than the rest.

Now I don’t know exactly how you’re supposed to account for this, but putting the covers on the outlets turned out to be a bit of a job.  I had cut the tile for the electrical boxes, and had not wanted to make the box openings too big.  Nothing worse than an outlet opening where the flanges on the receptacle don’t overlap the wall opening when you screw it in.  However, with tile, the opening does need to allow for the cover plate screw.  I had to go around to all my outlets and chip/drill for little screw on all my boxes.  Pain-in-the-butt, but I don’t know how else I would have handled it.  With sheetrock it’s no big deal -the screw just augers in by itself, but that isn’t the case with tile.  Here’s a picture -don’t ask why wordpress won’t let me rotate this…

Notice that little notch in the upper tile for the cover plate screw... Ugh!

I made a list of a few items I need to get in place before final inspection, and I’ve already been down to Home Depot to pick em up.  Once those are in place, I hope I’m ready to go.  I will be missing a couple end panels for some of the cabinets, and the crown molding, but I hope that it won’t be something the inspector will hold me to.  If anyone knows if this will be a problem -please lemme know.

Tile, tile, tile…

I didn’t think I had any problems with tile, but I guess I developed a little dislike of it.  Now it’s nothing like my aversion to concrete, but I’m not a “tile kinda guy.”  All I could think of today was just getting this thing done and out of the way.  Now I still have to grout, but I accomplished what I had set out to do this weekend.

The back-splash looks pretty darn good if I say so myself.  The pictures don’t really do it justice.  I’ll try to remember to take some better ones once the grout is in.  Now the job went pretty well.  I didn’t breeze through it, but there were no big stoppers.  Not that it was a big deal, but it appeared that though the tiles were all the same color and style, they came from probably three different batches/manufacturers.  When looking at the finished side of the tiles, you couldn’t really tell the difference (though Maria might disagree with me on that one), however, when turned over, the differences were obvious.  Some were nearly flat with very few ridges, while others had lots of ridges, and the color of the underlying porcelain varied quite a bit.  No biggie, but the different materials behaved hugely different when cutting.  In particular, that last box of tile turned out to be incredibly brittle compared to the tiles I’d used to that point.  Cutting out for the outlets became quite a challenge with that box.  Whereas previously I could easily cut out the sides for an outlet and use the tile nibbler to chip out the tile to be removed, the new box of tile would practically crumble under the same circumstances.  It took several broken tiles to figure out that I had to change my approach to cutouts with these tiles and really work-out the old tile saw.  Why do just two cuts when you can do 10 for the same cutout?

So what did I learn, other than the perfect consistency of thin-set?  I learned that when I’m tired, have a headache, and am just not in the mood to work on the kitchen -I don’t enjoy tile work.  Too bad I couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do this part of the kitchen, but I feel like I saved a wad of money doing this for myself.  HOWEVER, this is my last big hurdle for this kitchen.  Once that grout is in, it should just be just little jobbies here and there before I can call in the inspector for my final inspection.

Saturday -Halfway through wall one of two...

The tile is up. Did I mention I painted that wall too?

Summer is done -back to work…

There are a few more items that need to be done before this kitchen is done.  We need crown, some paint, a couple panels for the ends of some of the upper cabinets, and the big thing -tile on the back splash.  Now there’s also the pantry, but that can wait (though I’ve already started it).  Maria ordered the tile several weeks ago, but apparently it was in Texas and it took a couple weeks to get out to our side of the country.  Now tie in all those items with the fact that it’s summer and we were trying to jam every summer fun trip into the last month or two, and I it becomes pretty obvious why I haven’t been making much progress on the remaining items on the kitchen project.

Well school started this week, so (with the exception of Labor Day) all the camping, site-seeing, and other miscellaneous trips out of town -are done with.  So do I have anything to show for the last five weeks or so?  Well I got one panel mounted.  The one that goes under the sink.  Hardly worth mentioning, but for the fact that that big-ole sink made it impossible to screw the panel in from behind like I had planned.

Can't run screws though those mounting holes in the middle -bad since the panel has a slight bow outward there.

Well I decided to get a little creative in dealing with this small issue.  I could have just glued it in place, but I really didn’t want to do that, so I came up with the idea of using rare earth magnets to do the job.  I ordered a couple packs of magnets that looked a lot like washers.  They were exactly what I wanted.  Small, but almost scary strong.  I mounted some washers to the cabinets and a couple magnets to the panel.  Worked like a charm!

Here are the magnets...

Here are a couple magnets and some washers mounted up...

I'm gonna do more panels like this! Looks great!

So the whole magnet thing was done a week or two ago.  This weekend was partially spent back in the kitchen.  I didn’t get a whole lot done, but things look pretty good.  I actually got a couple of the back-splash tiles up!  I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to do the whole kitchen, but I thought I could at least get things started.  Now I’m no tile guy by any stretch of the imagination, but after a slow start, things moved along pretty smoothly, and I’m happy with the results to this point.

Getting the hang of it. First row is in, and now working on the field...

First of three walls done...

Now my tile progress was pretty slow at the start.  Actually, really really slow, but now that I have the mix consistency down, and can throw up the thin-set with a little more confidence, I just might be able to finish putting up the tile next weekend -If I get the whole two days to work on it.  My brother-in-law’s tile saw (Rudy’s) is a life-saver.  A nice saw and a tool as simple as a tile-nibbler is all it takes to make this job a lot easier.  For anyone that cares, I’m using a 1/4″ square notch trowel for this job.

Entertaining…

Instructions:

Step 1. Insert shelf support in tray from bottom with keyway to rear of tray, install using (4) 3/4″ x #8 oval head screws into the shelf and tighten.  Position top shelf hub on top of tray with keyway to rear of tray, install using (3) 1 1/4″ x #8 flat head self-tapping screws into the bottom shelf support and tighten.

This is an excerpt from the instructions that came with the two lazy susans in the mail the other day.  Mind you that these instructions had no diagrams or pictures to show me what the the “top shelf hub” was or where the “rear” of the tray was.  I ended up tossing the instructions and winging it for the most part.  They ended up working fine, but not without a few “issues”.  Now I had problems finding three-shelf lazy susans that would fit in my 36 3/8″ tall cabinets.  However I found several sites that had ones that would fit 34 1/2″ and taller cabinets -great!  In fact most of the sites had lazy susans with the same specs, and they all looked almost exactly alike.  Well I just picked two from a cheaper site, and a week later they were sitting in my kitchen.  I un-boxed them, and everything looked good.  Everything except the center pole that the shelves hung on.  They were long.  Too long.  There was no way they’d fit in my cabinets.  I ranted and raved for a minute or two, but pulled myself together and went to work modifying the hardware so it would work.  A utility knife, a 1/4″ chisel, and a grinding wheel was all I needed.  About a half-hour later they fit, barely, but they fit.  I won’t go into the details of what I did.  It was a little too involved to go into.  Now I’d like to point out that all those websites that said these shelves would fit in a 34 1/2″ cabinets -were wrong.  They were all wrong!  Which means either they all plagiarized the mistakes from each other, or they all are posting information given to them without verifying anything.  Either way, I’m not real impressed.

Now the reason I put so much detail into describing my experience with the lazy susans is because…  That’s all I have to write about this week.  The twin’s 4th birthday was this weekend, and we hosted our first real party since the kitchen was torn apart about a year ago.  That meant we had to clean out the dining room and move all our kitchen stuff into the new digs.  Well we now have a fully functional kitchen.  It still needs work, but it’s working great!

Now we’re heading out of town next weekend to go camping, so there won’t be any entry next week, but I’ll get something posted as soon as we get time to make a little progress.

Those corner cabinets might actually be kinda useful with these babies!