I remember when Scott first took up the mantle of home improvement projects. I made fun of him, just like when he said “this year it’s all about the Bucs” or “Stripes” or when he notices my new shoes 5 seconds after I run into him. Actually I make fun of Scott a lot, sorry Scott, but it sure is good for a laugh! But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was that I too, now a homeowner, am getting caught up in household projects. You might think that buying a new house that I got to spend some time at the design center picking stuff out for would mean that as we moved in, it was exactly like I wanted it to be. Not so.
In this first installment of the home improvement posts, I’m going to discuss purchasing and installing cabinetry. Part of the long list of home improvement projects includes 3 separate cabinet oriented installations in the house.
- Wall cabinets in the office
- Entertainment Center in the living room
- Bookcases in the Study
The plan for getting this all done appeared simple at first: measure the rooms, decide on cabinets, order them, put them together, install them. Well, it’s not so simple. Turns out that in the cabinet industry like so many others, there is a host of jargon, assumptions, and subtle complexity to the projects that makes you appreciate that your father installed them for a living for many years and can lend you a combination of helping you do it and doing it while you try to be helpful by handing him tools or simply telling him what a great job he is doing.
The original plans looked like this (I know, I am addicted to visio):
Wall cabinets in the office
The entertainment center
Bookcases for the study.
With those designs, I ordered the cabinets. They come on a big palette and basically each cabinet is a box (or a cube even) open on one side. So for the 15 cabinets we ordered, we got 15 bottoms, 15 tops, 15 lefts, 15 rights, and 15 backs. Plus 8 doors (2 for each of 4 office wall cabinets). That’s a total of 83 pieces that needed to get wood conditioned (1 coat), stained (2 coats), and sealed (at least 3 coats). Here is a shot of just a few of the study and office pieces during the staining process.
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And here you can see a couple of the pieces we got installed while my dad was visiting over Fourth of July.
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The office cabinets will help declutter the office, now they just need doors…
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The bookcases still have a ways to go. Next comes trim, baseboard, and top molding.
Things I have learned:
- fraction measurements blow (actually I knew this, but now I have even more data points…)
- most people think cabinets are much higher than they actually are. For example, imagine how tall your dining room table is in inches. Really, make a guess… OK. Mine is 30 inches (2 and 1/2 feet). If you guessed that, you may be well suited to a career of building cabinets (or guessing the heights of things, they may have room for you in the circus…)
- Cabinets aren’t usaully ordered by their dimension exclusively, they usually also include the type of cabinet it is and that implies their height. Such as “Base”, “Desk”, “Vanity”. These terms refer to their height and depth, but their width is part of the name so 21″ wide Base cabinets are B21′s. These are what are in your kitchen most likely. They are 30 and 1/2 inches tall. Add a 4 inch toekick and a 2 inch countertop and you get 36″ high countertops which is what you find in most kitchens
- some cabinet heights are referred to as nominal which basically means that they aren’t that height, they are shorter but when you put the toe-kick (you knew they needed a toekick right?) they end up at the correct height (assuming your toekick is the correct height)
- 2×4′s are 1 and 1/2 by 3 and 1/2, 2×6′s are 1 and 1/2 by 5 and 1/2. I understand why they wouldn’t want to call them 1 and 1/2 by 3 and 1/2′s, but why not make them the size they say? Maybe you did the math above on the countertop height and thought, “Aha! They are 36.5″ tall” (no fair with the decimals it’ll bite you if you try to use them), “36 and 1/2 inches tall”. But that 4 inch toekick was really made out of 1 and 1/2 by 3 and 1/2′s so it was really just a 3 and 1/2 inch toekick and those countertops are really are 36″… A lot of this leads to why these projects involve a lot of thinking, drawing, planning. Perhaps they should make wood legos that all houses are built out of. That would be sweet.
- If you are going to put a wood sheet on the wall (like for instance in the spot between the tall cabinets in the bookcases above. You have to be sure to have the wood grain go vertically for a piece that sits vertically. A countertop, on the other hand, can have grain going horizontally. Now since sheets of veneer and plywood come in 4×8 with the 8 being the direction of the grain, if you want to cover a space that is 2 feet tall but 6 feet wide, you will have to stick two pieces together (laminate them) possibly using a biscuit joiner instead of just cutting a 2×6 piece out of your 4×8 sheet.
- 4′x8′ sheets really are 4′x8′ not 47 and 1/2″ by 95 and 1/2″… How will I ever piece them together properly with my 1 and 1/2 by 3 and 1/2′s?
This post made me think back fondly to the days when I was working in the lumberyard and doing things like putting up cabinets for a living (okay, doing random odds and ends while my dad did things like putting up cabinets). I also remember when I first found out about the odd measurements that wood comes in. Those were the good old days.
This post reminds me how josh always makes my dad work when he comes to visit.
It also reminds me how my dad rocks – and when he stays at your house you might wake up to find him adding dimmers to all of your lights just in case you want mood lighting. This is one of the reasons there is such a competition to have the folks stay at your house.