Another first for me on this project was building a cabinet from scratch. Our old kitchen had the stove pushed directly against our old pantry. Christy had the great idea to take the dead plate that filled in the gap between the left side of the stove and the sink cabinets, move it to the other side, and shift the stove away from the cabinet. You know, so our house doesn’t catch on fire.
We could have just moved it over, but it seemed like a shame to waste the space when we are trying to make the kitchen more functional. Plus, we were looking at getting a double oven, so we would no longer have a good place to store our baking sheets, pizza stone, etc. It was now or never.
I was originally going to buy something from Rev-A-Shelf, but everything was either too wide or too narrow, so I finally decided it was going to have to be custom. I originally called the company that built our peninsula cabinets, but that was going to be too expensive.
I didn’t do a ton of research into building it. We had our new peninsula cabinets in the room so I could look at their construction and I looked up some pictures online.
The toughest part was probably measuring things out to make sure that the door would sit flush with the old pantry cabinet and that the bottom and kick plate matched up. To make sure it all lined up, I just took the sides and put them up against the existing pantry cabinet before I assembled it. Other than that, it was just a matter of cutting the horizontal boards to the correct width to fit the space.
As with the double pantry I built, I used construction screws. I know cabinets typically aren’t constructed that way, but it was a really great option for someone like me that has zero experience building a cabinet. It might be ugly, but in this case it worked out fine because both of the sides would be concealed.
One problem I ran into was, how to secure it. For that, I just put a piece of wood at the top back to secure it to a stud and put a piece of 2X4 behind the kick plate, like I did with the peninsula cabinets.
For the soft close hinges, I needed to get a little creative. Unfortunately, they are designed for a metric hole. I could have have gone out and spent $15+ on a bit, but it seemed wasteful to spend $15+ to drill 2 holes. I looked up a calculator online and found the closes bit would be 1 1/2″.
Another issue was, it needed to be drilled with a forstner bit so I didn’t have a hole in the front of the door to patch. I do not own one of those, but I do have some old bits, so I took one and sawed the tip off. I started my hole with a bit with a tip so that I had a diameter of the hole to guide the “forstner” bit.
All in all, it worked out great. Christy and I are both glad we did it. Plus, I can now add cabinet building to my resume.
Like I’ve mentioned several times, I’m horrible at documenting the actual process, but here are the pictures I do have.
