31 Days of the Kitchen: Day One

For a long time, I’ve been putting off building a new kitchen in a nook of our living room. Our current kitchen is old and falling apart, and I’ve known for a long time that we needed to move the kitchen to a more open space, and convert the old kitchen space into an office and media room.

All that takes a lot of work, and it’s depressing to think about the idea of making big mistakes and getting the project wrong. So, though I’ve bought the materials and done some work on the project, I let it sit for a long time, dreading taking it back up again.

This month is the month that the kitchen gets built. There is plenty of work already done, so I think it’s quite possible to get it done in March, though there may be some materials that need to be ordered near the end of the month. In any case, I’ll be working on the project every day, and documenting the progress made.

Today, I started with a piece of the upper cabinetry. I say a piece, because I’m doing the cabinets in a non-standard way, building them myself so that they fit the space exactly. Today I took a piece of relatively cheap pine board that I had cut long ago, and attached it to the wall.

I cut this piece so that it would fit above the refrigerator, and extend far to the right. The tricky thing today was getting it in place, and being sure that it would support the weight of the upper cabinets and their contents. To do this, I opted to use screws that come with anchors, which can be seated in the wall with a special tool in such a way that they cannot slide back out, and apply pressure to a larger area of drywall.

With ten of these, I carefully made my marks in the board, then the children held it up on the wall while I marked the wall as well. As is tradition, my screws almost lined up perfectly with the anchors, but not quite.

We patiently tried again and again to get everything to line up correctly, as I made minor adjustments and continually dropped the little plastic washers that come with each screw. Finally, in a fit of frustration, I simply enlarged the entry holes in the board enough to give me the room necessary to hit the right angles.

The board is up. It’s in the right position, and hopefully it will stay there. There are two issues which I have identified so far. First, I can see that the heads of the screws protruding from the board will force me to make modifications to the cabinet walls, because I want the walls to hide those screw heads. Second, the plug for the hood may require me to make a hole in the board, and that might require me to take the board down.

In any case, the project is moving. I’ll have to think about the next step I want to take.