Sawdust on the Floor

When my father-in-law and I built our current kitchen cabinets, we made them using traditional methods. By that I mean that the cabinets all were built with the traditional toe kicks in the fronts of all of the lower cabinets. Those cabinets have been in place for over fifteen years. They have worn very well, but the finish is starting to show its age, and the design is dated. One of the things I do remember about installing them is how heavy and bulky there were, and how much time it took to get everything just right. Bud, my father-in-law, wouldn’t have had it any other way.

If you have ever installed cabinets, you know that one of the hardest things is getting them all plumb and level. That task is rather easy if you are installing a single cabinet, such as in a bathroom, but it gets rather complicated when you have a whole bank of cabinets like we do in our new kitchen. Your cabinets must be level across the entire range of the cabinets, not just one cabinet. At the same time they must also be plumb and square. If the floor and wall were perfectly flat and level, and we all know that will never happen, then you would simply place the cabinets in place, bolt them to the wall, bolt them together, and you’re done. It doesn’t work that way. Cabinets are heavy, they’re hard to move into place, and it’s real hard to shim a big cabinet into place.

I was looking thru a copy of “Fine Woodworking” magazine, and came across an article about building kitchen cabinets. The gentlemen who made the cabinets had an interesting idea. Make the base, (toe kick area) separate from the cabinet. In other words, if your cabinets cover a length of 96” wall length, make the base, a single piece that is that length. In this example the base piece would be 95 1/4” long, 20“wide and 3 ½ “tall. If you want a finished end, like the picture at the right, hold the base unit back by ¾”.

You would level this piece first, securing it to the wall and floor. Now you make your cabinets as a complete box with a flat bottom. I wanted my cabinets to be 36” high at the highest point. Our final choice for the countertop material is 1 ½ “thick. Adding the 3 ½” of the base, the actual cabinets are 31” tall.

This process worked like a champ. I was able to make the base out of ¾” Plywood. Glued and screwed together. I added horizontal pieces along the bottom and top, to give me some place to connect the base to the floor and the cabinets to the base. Leveling this light weight piece was a snap. A couple of shims, and some good old 3” long sheet rock screws and the entire base was installed flat and level. When I brought the actual base units in from my shop, the only issue left was scribing the cabinet ends to the wall.

Not only did I like the idea about making the cabinets in two pieces, we also fell in love with his design idea. Well, not totally in love with it, we made some changes. My cabinets go all the way to the ceiling. I plan to add crown molding when all are in place. We also choose a darker stain, and elected to use Mission style hardware. The one other change I made was more a structural choice than a decorative one. After kicking around several options for the counter top, we decided to go with a granite surface. Granite is quite heavy and I was concerned about the weight bearing down on a finished edge of the cabinets. On cabinets that will have an exposed end showing, I doubled up the side. I made the actual cabinet out of ¾” Plywood, and then applied the decorative end treatment to the outside of that cabinet. For all intents and purposes it looks like a normal cabinet, but I am now sure that it can hold any amount of weight ever applied to it.

Was this double wall an over kill? Perhaps, but it was the way I was taught to do woodworking. If you want some to last for many years, then you should build it to last at least that long. Sure it would have been easier, cheaper and quicker to not add the double wall. But as a woodworker, I would have known it wasn’t quite right, and I would have seen it every time I walked past the cabinet. If you are a true woodworker, you are probably agreeing with me right now.