ORC Week 2: Raising the Kitchen Cabinets

It’s week two of the One Room Challenge and we’ve made a lot of progress with our kitchen cabinets. First, we completely emptied the upper cabinets and moved everything into our dining room where we had set up some temporary shelves. I have a feeling this room will be out of commission for the next 5 weeks!

Next, all the cabinet doors were removed from the upper cabinets for painting and all but a few of our upper cabinets were taken down so that we could move them closer to the ceiling.

Man…it feels so open in here…maybe we should leave the upper cabinets down…

Ha! Oh right…too much stuff! Upper cabinets it is!

Before reinstalling the cabinets we made sure to attach pieces of 1×2 to the top of the cabinets set back about 1/8″ – these will be what the crown moulding will eventually attach to.

So funny story about reinstalling our upper cabinets – we have never installed (or uninstalled) kitchen cabinets before, so we figured we would take them down and that would show us how to put them back up. Seemed pretty straight forward – they had screws through the back of the cabinet into the studs, and screws through the sides into the neighbouring cabinets.

Being the smart DIYers that we are we decided to leave some cabinets up so that we had a guide when moving the neighbouring cabinets up. My husband Chris and his mighty strength held the cabinets in place and I screwed them into the studs.

Not surprisingly, all our cabinets were at slightly different heights and not quite level.

If you’ve ever installed kitchen cabinets before, feel free to laugh at us. If you’ve never installed kitchen cabinets before – please learn from our mistakes!

It wasn’t until we reinstalled the cabinets all wonky that we decided to actually look up how to install kitchen cabinets. Oops! Turns out you should attach a ledge to the wall to rest the cabinets on to keep them at the right height and level (not to mention easier to hold in place).

If you’re considering installing kitchen cabinets yourself I highly recommend reading this post from The Family Handyman and reading it before you try start the installation *slaps forehead*

Moving on!

While putting the cabinets back up we decided to make some layout changes as well. Chris and I both hated the hidden corner cabinet near the sink

So we decided to leave it off and replace it with some open shelves like these:

BUT when we put everything else up I felt that the 36” cabinet to the right of our microwave looked really strange because it was wider than bank of drawers below it.

I’m apparently the only person who noticed this and (of course) it started driving me crazy. My lovely family decided to humour me and agreed to swap out the 36” cabinet with the 27” cabinet that used to be in the corner. Perfect fit! The only problem with this plan is that the 27” corner cabinet only had one door, so we needed to order a second one.

This leads me to our big exciting news – when we ordered the new door we decided to splurge on some new cabinets to surround our fridge! I don’t have any pictures, but here’s  a drawing from our cabinet guy:

Apparently they will arrive in 3-4 weeks so *hopefully* I’ll at least have them installed by the end of this challenge.

So that’s where we’re at!

Taking over the dining room means we’re able to keep the kitchen relatively clean and I can still make my tea in the morning. I’m continuing to paint the cabinet doors, and now that the upper cabinets are in place Chris can get started on the electrical work and eventually start tiling. We picked up the tile yesterday and I can’t wait to see how it looks installed!

I hope you’re enjoying following along with our kitchen adventures. I know I’m so impressed by all the guest participants and the progress they’re making! Don’t forget to check out all the other amazing projects on Calling it Home!