Craftsman Kitchen Renovation Beginnings

[phil]

I had one look at teh Ikea and HD cabinets and they were all crappy particleboard junk with plastic roller gizmos on the drawers and they double up every separation because they sell them all as boxes.

I chose the european hinges. I didnt' want the silly rollers on drawers so I made them the old way, with slides. the slides are part of the structure of the cabinet.

I designed the cabinets the way I wanted. the top I made 4 inches deeper, that gave lots more countertop space.
I did not use the typical pre molded particleboard countertop but didn't want rock counters. I find them too cold and hard and they suck any heat from warm dishes. I made the tops from plywood and put some maple near the front edge. I rounded that over top and bottom so the front edge is maple and the tops are a formica that looks like stone.

I did make the drawers properly from maple with dovetail joints front and back , the bottoms are thin plywood not particleboard crap. I cut the slots for the drawer bottoms so I could sandwich the plywood and white formica on top so the bottoms are white inside and easy to clean. the drawer bottoms come out if you remove 1 screw.

I used really curly maple , the planks had lots of knots and figure so they have parts that really jump out with the beautiful grain patterns.

cabinet heights are normally higher in modern kitchens , more room for stuff on top of the counter without interfering with the uppers.

I wired it properly before installing the cabinets. You need a lot more plugs nowadays to mett code and every plug needs its own breaker so I have abotu 10 breakers just for the kitchen. we have more appliances in this day and age so dont corner yourself with a outlet shortage.

the hood fan .. you can get fandanged stuff witth the microwave or you can get fancy copper or stainless hoods. you should decide where you rare going wiht that. I chose an inset hood fan with a big blower. to incorporate that I made the uppers fit it . I made the uppers also 4 inches deeper and this gave troom to inset the hood fan because I didnt want tin and stuff sticking out.. that also made all the cabinets 4 inches deeper so I have way more room in them.

If you move the sink fridge or stove , think that through carefully . I did a layout and some scale pieces I could move around and explored every possibility for placement. try to make it so they are as close together as you can, it really helps if you can make it work ergonomically.

if you move the sink you can move the vent. anyway think about where the vent is. you need one , If you dont have a vent you might be able to use a drain waste vent but that is not preferable.

I made less cabinets than I plan to and that left lots of room and I can build and expand. with mine I moved stuff and left one wall open so that I or a future owner can open the wall and make a really huge kitchen if it is ever wanted. i plan to add another counter that appears only a foot deep with a bar sink and place for the coffee pot to live. that's to separate coffee making and cat dish cleaning from the cooking and keep that sort of traffic away from the cooking area. on the wall above I fouund deep spaces so I framed in some cubby holes they are room near my chimney that was originally dead space. they are really big and go right up to the ceiling so when I build my counters along that wall I will make them appear only a foot deep but the upper cupboards will have false backs so in actuality they will have huge spaces for storage of paper towels and stuff like that so we can buy bulk.

nowadays you should have 3 garbage cans recycle and food waste. think of where they can live. I restored my floors , think about cork maybe if you dont keep the original flooring.

[nhguy]

We have a couple books on bungalow kitchens. Jane Powell's book from 2000 where she talks about everything including flooring. The one in our kitchen is an Armstrong #5352 apparently, except ours is yellow green instead of the brick color. Then we have the Taunton Press book New Bungalow Kitchen. Lots of ideas in this 2007 edition. Luckily we have time, so we'll be patient and get this project right or as close as we can anyway.

[Gothichome]

Nhguy, are you hoping to incorporate that nice metal sink unit into your new period kitchen.

[nhguy]

Nhguy, are you hoping to incorporate that nice metal sink unit into your new period kitchen.

I have to say we love the steel kitchen that the previous owners had installed around 1950, as I love the drainboards when washing dishes. Saving it for our new kitchen is probably not in the cards. It's in pretty poor condition, but we do hope to find someone that can use it in a camp. Our plan at this point is to have a soapstone sink with a drainboard carved into the soapstone counters on the left or right side. Plan B if that turns out to be too expensive is to have a stainless steel sink with a drainboard, along with the soapstone counters.

[Gothichome]

Some one restoring a small period bungalow might be interested in it. Could be a Craig’s list item when the time comes.

[phil]

there are two basic ways to approach the building of cabinets. Face frame or frameless.

the frames and incorporated drawer slides are more traditional. in the old days they did not have sheet goods so panels were made up without any sheet goods being involved. when sheet goods became popular then cabinetry construction changed.

I'd suggest referring to some old books and perhaps pulling the drawers out of any vintage cabinets you have to note the differences in construction.

modern cabinets are often made using sheet goods and often there are still face frame designs but in general sheet goods are still used unless one is trying to replicate traditional cabinetry methods.

myself I hate the roller guides , no metal is needed to make drawers slide easily and last for years. the excess complication is used to make them cheaper to build and people are sold on things like gimmicky self closing drawers and such.
likewise European style hidden hinges are common and you can decide if you'd rather have the more traditional and simple type of door hinges.

If you use sheet goods there is a range between particleboard covered with some sort of coating like a wood look label ( like mactac) or they use a hard white (melamine) coating to encase the particleboard. You can buy cabinet plywoods and they often have very thin veneers of exotic woods.
older or "antique plywood" has thicker plys than most modern plywood and it was stable because they used better wood for the core. some tabletops were made of a solid core, the inside was solid wood with a veneer applied to the top and bottom.
modern cabinet plywoods tend to be more stable than construction grade plywood , better wood used in making the cores. you can use better plywoods with core that has less voids. sometimes that is done in places where they wish to show the edges of plywood and not hide them.
one way to hide edges is to cut strips of wood and glue the to the edges of your sheet goods.

once you start using sheet goods you need to think about how to hide the edges. In cheap production cabinets they use an edgebander that puts a thin edge of wood or plastic on the edges. this is common for particleboard. they might even just wrap the melamine over the edges of particleboard , now that's really being cheap. modern factories strive to make fake wood waste crap look like its something nice and they are quite good at it.

doors were also made from panels traditionally and the filler panels were made from thin strips of wood. I used some thin maple plywood to match my maple frames but a more traditional method would not use any plywood.
plywood is dimensionally stable in both directions so it doesn't move much but with traditional panels the panel needs to float so as it grows and shrinks it doesn't push the frame apart. with plywood they sometimes put little rubber balls to keep the panel centered and able to shift if it needs to.

particleboard is crap made out of wood chips. Its stable unless it gets wet in which case it turns to garbage. it wont hold screws well , if they pull out then you have a big mess to fix as sometimes a chunk comes out with it. the european hinges require big holes drilled part way through. since the hinge sits in a socket cut in the particleboard this helps them not fall off because the screws fell out. If you use plywood you might go for regular old hinges that you can see from the outside of the cabinet. do the hinges detract? the hinges dont really fail and the self closing "feature" is a bit of a gimmick. I dont recall ever having trouble closing the door of a cabinet that worked properly. do we need a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist? maybe it helps them all close fully so we dont look like we are being sloppy.. or maybe we just got sold on this "feature" because they needed to figure out how to attach crappy particleboard doors to hinges without the screws for the hinges pulling out.

its an investment and you might not want to hire a cabinetmaker with traditional skills. all the traditional cabinets can be made now with automated CNC machinery using the older building methods. you might choose to just buy particleboard boxes pre-made and assemble onsite.. from an IKEA box straight from china. a lot follow that route. Why does everything Ikea makes say made in China if it is Swedish?

If you can afford it you might choose to not use particleboard but Its not my decision or my money. If you really want to get into it you can design the cabinet yourself and take the drawings to a cabinetmaker to get help finalizing them and the price.

I'd suggest reading a little about different cabinetmaking techniques and the hardware associated. then you can slide towards modern standards of cabinetmaking if you like. I've seen things like people puling out drawers and looking at the front edge to observe some dovetails , then they exclaim look dovetail drawers! jumping to the conclusion that they were made using traditional methods not realizing for example that the back of the drawer is just stapled on and the dovetails are just a sales gimmick.
flip the drawers over. look at the material they made the drawer bottoms out of and how that is retained. It should slot into the sides and front on cheap stuff they staple it on or staple strips in there to hold it together. bottom line you dont want he drawer bottoms to ever fall out because they are made from crap held with staples and scotch tape.

the back of the drawer should come down to the drawer bottom and if made correctly you can take out one screw and slide the bottom out.

this stuff becomes really important when the drawers fall apart and you need to fix them. If they are made using traditional methods they are really unlikely to fail , just like the drawers wont usually fail on an old dresser. just look how many old ones survived!

then there are tolerances. pull a drawer out , wiggle it left to right. some cabinetry is constructed with such loose tolerances you'll see things like adjacent drawers able to interfere with each other. you need the right amount of clearance to make it work without binding but not a huge sloppy gap.

if you go look at the modern stles where they dont even use a face frame then you can see how now there is no gap , no gap, no clearance issue. modern cabinetmaking methods hide the gaps, often the doors will fit over the face of the cabinet instead of needing to fit the hole. if the door or the drawer needs to fit the hole it needs to fit better. If it closes to hide the cabinet completely it leaves more wiggle room so if the cabinet itself is warped or buckled, it hardly shows. If you want the cabinet doors to fit between the face frames then you have more of a challenge to make it all correct and fit well or it will show.. If the drawer fronts lap over the hole for the drawer it hides the fact that the drawer ins't really made to fit very exactly so that's an example of how cabinetmaking evolved to make poor fit not be so evident. its a cost saving measure that became just so commonplace it seems normal. Fine furniture has a better fit and so closer tolerances are needed .. but in modern cabinets they just screw on the drawer guides. the cost of the metal and plastic guides is less than labor and expertise to fit them right. traditional cabinetmakers prided themselves on not using hardware or metal fasteners unless they found it necessary. cabinets predate screws, it is one of the oldest trades. in older times to become a cabinetmaker you had to sweep the floors , sand cabinets, gain trust then if they liked you and thought you were unlikely to go across the street to the competition, they taught you some of the highly guarded trade secrets. Today we dont really worry about sharing information. we have a different mentality towards sharing of information.

with mine I made the drawers before I decided to increase the cabinet depth. If I had known where I was going I could have made super extra deep drawers. I do have the option to install 4" deep hidden compartments that can be accessed by pulling the drawer right out.

most cabinets these days follow a newer method of cabinet style that makes the best use of 4x8 plywood so you will find that 1/3 of a sheet is 16 inches. If you decide for example that you wanted them your own sizes then you may find your plywood costs go up due to waste. with traditional cabinetry they were all basically made with strips of wood so this was not a limitation.
this is one reason pretty much all modern cabinets follow standards. also you want modern things like dishwashers to fit the dimensions if you incorporate them. If your aim is to break the norms to reflect traditional cabinetry you may find you can break some of the modern standards to leave you with a more classic vintage look.

in that kitchen your space is really limited by all the doorways. It might be possible to use prefab boxes and extend your counter top a bit more to give more counter top space. see how it might work . I pulled my stove forward 4 inches and there is a little space behind it . I planned to make a shelf that will stand behind it and fill that space but it is actually not too noticeable. then the uppers could be deep too but as soon as you vary the dimensions you are moving into custom cabinetry. all I lost was 4 inches of floor space and it gave me way more usable counter space.. I'm really glad I did that and it doesn't appear weird.

I've been in cabinet shops that do the whole thing from electronic plans. If you went somewhere like that then they might be able to quite easily resize dimensions and still use automation. these factories employ robots that can cut every part with great precision very quickly and they can do custom work that way, not just repetitive work. cutting your own dovetails with a chisel requires a craftsman not a "cabinet installer" a robot can do that all day with no coffee break.. so hand cut dovetails put the thing into a different league and you may or may not appreciate that enough to utilize it.

I found that when I priced out the modern cabinets the build quality was crap , they use particleboard and it was still really expensive. buying the standard sized boxes might be one of your cheapest and fastest alternatives. If you were to sell the house then you'd have to factor in how much a custom kitchen would affect the price. kitchens have sort of evolved from work areas to areas where we spend leisure time so while a really traditional kitchen may look impressive you may find it really isn't as functional as something more modern so you need to find the comfort balance you want in your house while keeping practicality and price in mind.

low uppers were more traditional but then when you have no place to put the coffee pot except on top of the stove, then maybe isn't so great. some hide their microwaves or have wood fronts on fridges or dishwashers to hide the modern junk.. If you can get rid of things like thing that beep or excess clocks and LED and stuff it might have a nicer and more peaceful feel. i just bought a coffee pot and it has this bright blue LED on the start button,, yea like I needed that thing glowing in my face all the time. it has a clock but I'd need to find where I put my glasses to read it and why does everything need a clock? now if I unplug my coffee pot to wipe the counter I need to spend 10 minutes finding my glasses and another 10 minutes setting it? that I would consider a modern inconvenience but the sales lady in the store called it a "feature"

in the diagram below, this isn't exactly a plan for a cabinet. You may also notice the drawer as no dovetails and it has two fronts to hide the gap. but the illustration shows how the cabinet is constructed basically from strips of wood instead of from sheet goods. you may find differences on how the drawers are assembled and fitted.. If you compare to modern cabinetry you'll find the modern ones are all sheet goods , some dados the hold the shelves. they are basically just square boxes. in the figure below you can see how the cabinet structure forms a frame that is very strong with no sheet goods involved. these techniques can be combined in different ways. in my case I opten to not use particleboard but I didn tmind that the sides of the cabinet were plywood since they do not show without going inside. one side of my uppers did show so for that I used panel construction so the side doesnt' look like a sheet of plywood but more like a cabinet door having a frame made of wood and a filler panel. the panels to either side of the stove did not need not be made that way since they are less visible, so I just used 3/4 cabinet plywood with a maple veneer for parts like that. faster to cut the panel from plywood. I glued on some strips of wood to hide the plywood endgrain.

[nhguy]

little house pantry.JPG (791.26 KiB) Viewed 2036 times

I have looked into lots of cabinet companies, there are still some that build from plywood or they give you the upgrade option. We are looking at a local commercial cabinet shop that does good work. We don't know the costs for our project yet. I tend to be pretty picky with the quality. My own work is paint grade only, and we want better than that this time. I take forever to do the crafting of drawers and doors. Thanks for your ideas and answer back. Here's the pantry I built in the 1840 cape we owned.

[phil]

the picture of the cabinet structure wasnt' quite right for a kitchen cabinet.
I was lucky to do mine when my dad was still here and he was a cabinetmaker he had built a lot of cabinets but also had a lot of experience making repro english antiques back in the 50's.
the way he showed me to do the drawer slides, we basicly used 4 pieces about 3/4 x 2" and made square frames with mortice and tennon joints cut on the tablesaw.
we did this by cutitng a groove one side of all the stock then cutting the tennons at the ends of two of them. they sit under the drawer and support it. If you use sheet goods or panels, doesnt' matter you can cut dados to support these guides. they didnt do that in the diagram. this way the guides are a part of the structure of the cabinet. in some cabiets they fill in this panel and call it a dust shelf.. it isnt' really needed but it is a feature in some high end cabinetry.

In the pic they just have two guides because it is being made for shelves maybe.. but they show a drawer too.

the back of the drawer isnt' as deep as the sides because the bottom goes underneath the bottom of the back piece. the way it is int he drawing you would have to get the bottom in when assembling the drawers so it is then impossible to remove the bottom.

he and cut the dovetails for one set of drawers. i bought a jig to cut the dovetails with a router for the rest. the router setup is a bit fiddly then when you get it right you can cut as many as you like very quickly, Id recommend that if you want to take it to that level. the machien cut dovetails dont' have the same degree of crafstmanship but it is a mechanical process, get it set up right and they fit so perfectly it is amazing. Ill find the brand of jig if you are interested. cabinet shops may have fancier machines they make machines just for cutting dovetails commercially. you can try your hand if you have the patience, its a good skill.

dont forget the kick panel. If you use sheet goods you can cut a noitch in the bottom fromt edge of about 4" x 4" to incorpporate it. If you use panels you can make the base as a separate component.

one thing I did to set things off was I used a lot of very figurative maple for the rails and stiles etc. it was very knotty planks so I intentionally used some of that wood near the knots as it has exciting figure.

another thing I did was when I made the drawer fronts, I cut those from one piece so that the grain pattern continues from one drawer to the next.

U ses formica that looks like stone. I like it ok. where I had edging I cut it from the same piece so that as it wraps it looks like it is the same piece, fools the eye into thinking it is stone.

for the front edge I cut some maple about 1.5" ax 2" and attached that to the edge of my plywood. I doubled up the plywood and used my biscuit joiner to reinforce the joint then did a roundover top and bottom front edge. I left it slightly proud then hand scraped it so it was perfectly level with the formca so there is no gap for stuff to get caught in. since my cabinets had deeper tops I neded more width and I found I could get it as an oversize sheet.

someone put a hot pot on my countertop so I bought a new piece the same while I could get the pattern, but Ive yet to strip it and replace the stuff. I could not buy the counter that deep so i made my own , with stone that wouldn't be an issue but may affect price perhaps.

I didn't want the formed particleboard stuff with the backsplash molded in to it. I didn't' put a backspash yet. . It really hasn't been an issue but I had planned just to use a simple little wood strip to stop any water going down the back. since my cabinets are set forward if I pull the stove I can access some room behind it and that kind of helped to make the wiring and plumbing for dishwasher and garbage disposal easy to service.
I put a light switch on the wall , it is to turn the hood fan on and off but it has its own switch anyway. i was close enough to the vent that I used the one that existed even though I moved the sink a few feet. I was originally going to do an island with a sink, with that I might have needed to use a drain waste vent instead of a stack but the stack is better.
id think about anythign you want o do in the walls like pull in more wire or insulate before the cabinets are in place. I pulled the drywall and insulated then put it all back.
check the wall behind the counter , see if it is flat and if it is square. there is a technique where you use story poles to make measurements and keep them throughout the job. these are just measuring sticks but since you are using the same points of reference it helps accuracy. If your space isn't square and plumb you may be best to fix that otherwise you need to custom fit the cabinet to a bent wall for example.

I noticed in the electrical info, the fridge needs its own breaker but it can share a clock plug. we dont really use clock plugs since they are all battery clocks but I kept mine and I like old 50's kitchen clocks that plug in.. the idea is that if power goes out the stopped clock or the amount the clock is out tells you how long it was off. you can still buy the inset plugs with a hook on them for that I used my old bakelite one, it looked fine. I think that is the only part I reused. I even changed all the boxes.
I installed an outlet behind my counters for the dishwasher and the garbage disposal. there are some rules about plugs being accessible.

I'm not crazy about painted woodwork myself , I love the look of nice woods so If I make any I won't paint them but its a personal choice and you want things to fit together with your own stiles and colors. I chose simple chrome handles for drawer and cupboard pulls but you can make your own choices on the jewlery you use. if you go to the effort to make your own cabinets you can splurge a bit on the materials since you will save lots but it will take time as you know. your cabinet looks nice and I know they are some work there is a learning curve and many ways to "cheat" some use the Kreg jig and screws. I hate that stuff but it can be fast I guess. I bought a biscuit joiner because I got it cheap. I just used it to join butt edges of plywood where it cant' be seen and things like that. It's a handy tool that you dont really need. dowels work fine too.

I bought a tennoning jig for my tablesaw. hardly used it after dad showed me how to cut them his way.. It has some advantage that it will hold pieces vertical to the blade to cut the tenons but I was shown a different way just using a push block. once I really analyzed both techniques I realized there is some slight differences , hard to explain but the jig registers the cut to only one side of the wood. the way dad showed me you cut twice and register either side to the fence, this registers the cut to both sides of the work. when you get to fitting things like cabinet doors the step created needs to be minimized or hidden. with the jig you register to one side so stock thickness variation and warpage can result in one side looking perfect and the other side having some step. you can correct the differences with sanding or planing.. Its a bit hard to explain until you try it and realize the fit is important so you dont see a step. If you can see a step with the cabinets open inside the door well maybe that is acceptable. in a commercial shop they have big drum sanders that you feed stock through and sanders like that can size things like that in one go. ( to remove any step created by minor and expected inaccuracies of a few thousandths of an inch where the stiles and rails meet up. )

I have a neighbor that got going playing with FEMO, she said she made someone fork and knife handles and knobs to match. I though that was a cute idea.

my brother made a little trap door in his kitchen. if you open it it turns on a vacuum cleaner downstairs and you can sweep the floor into it then close the door and it shuts off. saves going for the dustpan.

its fun and time consuming. You really cant' live without the sink. when I did mine I stripped all the cabinets and had the sink and countertop left staning on crude supports while I made the cabinets to fit so I wouldn't need to go long without the sink.

I have a great big kitchen sink that is for an undercounter application like a stone countertop. it was about 500 bucks Id be happy to pass it along to someone for 100 plus shipping if there is anyone that needs such a big stainless sink. Its a bit deeper than normal. I find deep sinks give me a sore back as It makes me lean forward so I just used a standard double sink which was cheap. also I decided not to go with the stone top. formica was cheaper and I like that it is warmer and dishes dont clink on it. I would consider the man made products..

and pull out breadboards seem to have gone out of fashion but I like them . I did't add one kind of regret not doing so. you could use teflon or some sort of coating like formica if the wood contamination is a food safe issue. easy way to extend counterspace.

[nhguy]

Great thought on not be able to live without a sink. When we go to renovate I may pull the Shirley Economy 54 sink unit and install it in the basement. That would give us a normal place to do dishes besides the tub or me carrying them down to the brook(that's a joke sort of). We'll likely go with a single sink and drain board either in white enameled steel or SS. We like soapstone as a counter material, but may change our mind when we see the price. Down in the basement I have door from the last kitchen, which would have been the bungalow one. They are a shaker style painted gray. They are also quite heavy, so probably maple or perhaps oak. We hope to use a door of similar style in our kitchen. Our current kitchen has one of those pull our bread boards we love that feature and use it every day, I wouldn't mind having two in different locations. My mother worked a Telechron Clock Company that made those electric clocks with a little red dot that was exposed when the power went out. I have two of them one in my shop, from the late 1930's. It was originally a kitchen clock, probably in my grandmothers house. Everyone in Ashland MA had one of Henry Warren's Telechron Clocks. Again thanks for your ideas as always.

[Manalto]

My mother worked a Telechron Clock Company that made those electric clocks with a little red dot that was exposed when the power went out. I have two of them one in my shop, from the late 1930's. It was originally a kitchen clock, probably in my grandmothers house. Everyone in Ashland MA had one of Henry Warren's Telechron Clocks. Again thanks for your ideas as always.

Those clocks were well made. They hold up well and I'm told they can even be repaired.