Bottoms Up

I have many fantasies but not all of them include the beautiful bag girl at the local market. Years ago I wrote about my fantasy in where Norm Abram from The New Yankee Workshop would come and help me build these cabinets. Well guess what? Just as with the bag girl, my fantasies about Norm have gone unfulfilled. I was forced to build the cabinets myself.

So its 10:00 AM Saturday morning and I’m about to start assembling the lower cabinets. I start to feel queasy at the thought of putting them together. The palms of my hands and feet get sweaty. Suddenly I drop to my knees in the middle of the dining room. Looking up at the ceiling, and with a single clenched fist reaching in to the air, I yell out, “Why have you forsaken me Norm Abram!!!!”

I then composed myself as best I could and continued on with the assembly.

I can honestly say that everything I know about making cabinets, and carpentry in general, I’ve learned from watching The New Yankee Workshop. Even so, I don’t build cabinets the same way Norm does. In no way would I dream of suggesting that my way is better than his. In fact, I would say that Norm’s method of construction is better than mine. My way works for me, though, so that’s the way I do it.





As you can see, I have the bottom section mostly put together. I went with 3 drawers on the butler’s pantry side (Thank you Kathy). I also went with a traditional face-frame instead of beadboard. The middle part with the shingle scraps is just tacked in to place at this point. I needed to get that up there because it is important that I calculate the height of the uppers accurately. The trim work around the entire cabinet will be identical to the trim work around all of the windows and doors in the room. I need to make sure the tops of the cabinets will be high enough so the 1X6 casing will cover the gap. In order to get an accurate measurement I needed to have the middle section in place. It will come down shortly.

There is still a lot of work to do on the lower cabinets. I need to install the bottoms, drawer guides, and shelves. Of course, I need to make the doors and drawers, but that will be the very last thing. What I would like to do is to add an additional a stile on either side to separate the cabinet doors. I don’t know if I have enough wood, though.

With a center stile each door would have its own cabinet latch. With out it, the latch would be on one door and the catch on the other. The door with the catch would have an additional hook mechanism on the inside. This is the way the cabinet in the laundry room was constructed.

So the plan now is to stop building the lowers and to start construction of the upper face frames and upper middle section. Once those are done, if I have enough wood left over, I will add the additional stiles to the lowers. I can then go back and finish the lower cabinets. As with the lowers, the first thing to do on the uppers is to make the center section. So that’s the next job.

Oh, and as it turned out, the center panel I made for the lowers was a quarter-inch too wide and needed to be trimmed. Another way of looking at this is to say that if I had made it a half-inch narrower I would have been screwed because it would have been too small to fill the space.

Whew!