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.
