In this post, I’ll review our peninsula cabinets and the guides we used for the doors. This was one of the many firsts on this project for me, so it was nerve racking at times.
The nerve racking part wasn’t so much the work itself, but the work coupled with the cost of the cabinets.
I originally bought 3 stock cabinets from Lowes, but I just couldn’t stomach it. The quality was too low.
I could foresee us having a nice slab of stone put on top and a couple years later, the support for the drawers come ripping out of the particle board due to the weight of the contents and use. That is the kind of luck we have.
Plus, at that time we were going to keep and refinish the existing cabinet doors and the stock cabinets didn’t quite match the bevel on those, so it would be obvious that we had different style cabinets.
Luckily, Christy was able to find a local business that does custom woodworking. This flew in the face of us doing this kitchen on a budget. We went from $110 stock Lowes cabinets. to $731 custom built cabinets.
We don’t regret the choice at all. It was worth it to have something that was made out of solid wood so that we didn’t have to worry about it falling apart.
We were originally going to have them make the peninsula cabinets with doors that matched our existing cabinet doors, but…
While we were there, we discussed having them make shaker doors to replace our old, dated doors. If you give a Christy a custom built cabinet, she’s going to want a custom built cabinet door to go with it.
Again, a great decision. This added another $1,153 to the cost of the remodel, but it really brought our old cabinets back to life. A small price to pay to make them look modern and it was much more cost effective than replacing them with new.
Installing the peninsula cabinets
I watched a few videos on installing cabinets and they are the primary reason I was nervous. In one video, the guy was connecting the cabinets by drilling through the side of the face. I could see it now – my drill going off center and drilling out through the front or the wood splitting.
I asked the guy at The Wood Works about it when I picked them up and he thought that drilling through the face was crazy. He said to cut pieces of wood to run vertically between the cabinets and drive screws through both side walls – 3 screws in the front and 3 in the back.
I had them make the overlap of the cabinet face 1/4″ on each side to accommodate the 1/4″ oak we wrapped on the side and back, so I used 1/2″ X 1 1/2″ strips between the cabinets and 1/4″ X 1 1/2″ strips on the wall side to attach it to the wall studs.
The reason for the strips, from what I read, is to keep the sides of the cabinets from bowing and cracking as the screw pulls them together.
Christy also found online that you need to install 2″ X 4″ boards to the floor underneath the cabinets and screw through the kick plate into the 2″ X 4″ to secure them to the floor. I added a board at the front of each cabinet and boards at the rear on the 2 end cabinets.
This part was more of a pain in the ass than it sounds. Making sure these roughly 8″ long boards were properly spaced from the wall and from each other to snugly fit the cabinets over them took more time than I thought it would.
Again, I suck and documentation, so I have no pictures of any of these steps. I was too focused on getting the work completed while Christy had the kids out of the house.
Preparing for the shiplap
A tip before I get to the hardware guides is, if you are doing faux shiplap, one thing to consider is to stain or paint between the boards so that you don’t see a different color in the gap.
What I did at this stage was, I took a level from the wall shiplap gap and penciled in a line on the peninsula cabinets. I used those as a guide to stain the cabinets so that I didn’t have to go in with a small paint brush after the wood was up.
In this picture you can also see the 2 strips that run from the floor to the top of the cabinet to secure the cabinets together and make them one piece.
Drilling guide for the hardware
This would have been another nerve racking part of the project, but Christy found guides for drilling the holes.
The one she originally bought of Amazon actually ended up being a disappointment. Christy found this one for $10 at Home Depot and luckily they had it in stock at our local store.
This is one of the bottom drawers, but what I did was find the right hole spacing for our hardware, find the vertical center for our smaller drawers, and mark my guide holes with painters tape and drew on arrows to easily identify them as I worked my way through the 9 cabinets.
I used the same spacing on the large drawers as I did the small ones. We were originally going to center them all vertically, but the guide did not go low enough to do that. We think the big drawers look good with them raised up, off center.
If you ever have to mount hardware, I highly recommend these guides. The plastic is tinted, but easy to see through so you can lay out all of your drawers, mark your horizontal center with a pencil, and easily see through the plastic to eyeball your center point to drill your holes for the hardware.
Another tool I picked up, thankfully before this stage, were self centering drill bits.
Christy loves hooks and I wish I had these 22 hooks ago. If you are like me, your holes are usually never 100% center when mounting something like a hook, so you have to get things near tight and have to try to force whatever you are mounting level while you finish tightening the screws.
The beveled spring loaded tip guides your bit right in the middle of your guide hole. I’m glad I stumbled across them.
The finished product
And here are the completed peninsula cabinets. They turned out great and now we have so much storage that nothing feels cramped.
