Another Cabinet

We have a running joke of tackling one house project a year. In the beginning of the year, we finished our bathroom cabinet. The year trucked on and we didn't think much about doing anything else around the house.

During the summer, I brought up the topic of painting our built-in cabinet located in our breakfast nook to my husband. We had put this off when we originally painted the kitchen cabinets...because the kitchen cabinets were already a monster to tackle and took a lot of time to DIY. This built-in was also located away from the rest of the cabinets so it could stand alone as a piece of furniture. The second reason we put it off was because the top cabinets have glass so you can see into it. This meant a more time-consuming prep and painting process.

We revisited this conversation of painting the cabinet this summer. We talked about painting it white to match the rest of our kitchen. This idea was halted when we realized we'd need to purchase a new gallon of white paint because we didn't have enough leftover in our existing gallon to complete this project. We also discovered the lip which secures the glass will not be able to be painted. So if the cabinet surface was going to be white, the lip underneath the glass would still be wood-colored. That nixed the white paint idea.

We discussed scrapping this project completely due to this hiccup, but then I brought up painting the cabinet in a dark blue paint. This paint was a random $9.00 purchase from the "oops" paint shelf at Home Depot our first year of living in this house. It's an exterior-grade oil paint, I liked the color, and we originally purchased it to repaint the trim around the windows on our back porch. As we remodeled and replaced exterior patio doors, I continued to use this paint for the doors as well. I even used the same paint to paint over some beige tiles on our window ledge. 

We made the decision to go for it and paint the cabinet blue. Walking into this project, I knew I was going to be the one painting 100%. I actually enjoy painting, and now since getting AirPods, I can knock out a number of audiobooks while painting which makes the entire process a lot of fun for me. I will forever remember Me Before You by Jojo Moyes as the book which grounded this entire project. 

Cutting in for this cabinet took hours.

The cabinet box and shelves took two days to complete - one for primer and one for paint. Painting in between all the shelves was the hardest part because none of the shelves in this cabinet are removable. Because of the glass doors on top, I had to make sure to cover every nook and cranny including the undersides of every shelf. 

Originally, the project was supposed to start after we returned from our trip. Due to having some extra time, I actually finished the inside paint and primer before we left. This ended up being a much-needed change because the fumes from the oil-based paint were heavy. This was the second time we had used this paint indoors and the fumes this time were probably 2-3x stronger than previously because there was so much more surface area to cover and much more paint used. Coming back from our trip to a non-fume-filled house was a breath of fresh air, literally. 

After our trip, I had to finish painting the doors. This took one day and I was able to paint everything outside.

I spy some creative drop cloth weights. 😅

We finished this project in three days (of actual painting) with a total cost of $0. All the materials we used were purchased from previous projects or reused multiple times. The one expense we did purchase for/because of this project was a gallon of paint thinner. I did that in order to save my $10 Zibra Triangle paint brush from being ruined by oil paint. But the actual cost of this project is still $0.

I absolutely love the finished results.

I'm really happy with the way this project turned out. It's not perfect by any means and there are visible flaws, but for the amount of time spent and the cost of the project, the results far surpassed what I thought could be done. 

My favorite part of completion was actually purchasing risers to display our little trinkets on. My mini snow globe souvenirs can proudly be displayed in the cabinet now.

A sample of my snow globes and global trinkets.

Another Cabinet

We started the year with a project again. It's no surprise, we did the same thing last year. Although this year's project didn't involve any cleaning out, it was motivated by organization and storage.

Since we remodeled our bathroom in 2017, we've had a little niche in the bathroom. Originally, we had a massive storage cabinet and a tiny shower. When we remodeled, we enlarged the shower and stole some space from the original cabinet. We did not put a cabinet back, and instead, were left with this niche. 

It had strange dimensions. 96 inches tall. 24 inches deep. 20 inches wide. For the last six and a half years, we put a shelf in the space, but it didn't fit well, left a lot of unused space on top, and a lot of unused space on the sides. I would always go on random rabbit trails online looking for shelves or cabinets we could use to fill the space. Last winter, we finally committed.

We found a tall, narrow pantry cabinet which had the closest dimensions to our space: 96 x 24 x 18.

Moving this box into our bathroom took some skill.

The actual installation of the cabinet itself was rather quick. The problem was the details. We had a six inch gap at the top and a two inch gap on the sides. The goal was to make this cabinet look built-in, like it belonged perfectly in the space. 

Test-fitting the cabinet. 

As a result, we needed to fill the side, cover it in trim, and somehow figure out a way to fill the gap at the top of the cabinet. We brainstormed ideas to "crown" the top in trim, build an insert to fill the space, or somehow extending the top of the cabinet. In the end, we ended up using a genius trick to fill the space: raise the cabinet up from the bottom. 

We had some existing wood in our garage which hadn't been thrown out during last year's purge for the lift. My husband built a box for the cabinet to sit on and secured the entire cabinet on top of the box.

Much smaller gap, and I painted. We added three extra shelves because the unit
originally came with two. We can now maximize that space in storage.

My husband really detests painting. I've done all our DIY painting projects we've ever done. The only thing he painted was our master bathroom vanity cabinets. I was pregnant at the time so he primed and painted those. The rest? All me, now including this cabinet and three additional shelves we added. 

We added some hardware, reattached the doors, and voila! A built-in cabinet in an awkward space. You'd never know it wasn't planned to be there in the first place. The best (and most ironic) part was about a day after this cabinet was installed, I'd already "forgotten" about it. It blends in seamlessly into the rest of our bathroom and stores a ton of our extra towels and toiletries.

A Wood-Filled Weekend

With a sequence of events, we need to clear our some more space in our garage. One of the main things that needs to go is a bunch of wood we've saved up over the years from various projects. Before just getting rid of all of it or giving it away, I thought we should try and finish some of our own projects which have been on our to-do lists for years and years now. We accomplished both of these projects this past weekend:

1. A "box" to cover the vent hood pipe that goes into the ceiling in our kitchen. 

In April of 2021, we made the decision to vent our range hood vent outside instead of having a recirculating one. It was one of the better decisions we've ever made for our house because I love it so much. I can cook and vent the smells outside and you can't smell anything after a few hours. I don't regret anything about the project except the person we hired. For the last 1.5 years, we've been staring at a really ugly ceiling patch where the pipe connected into the attic. The pipe is also not centered, but that is secondary to the ugly ceiling.

My husband has mentioned wanting to build a box around it to hide the pipe from the beginning to fix both problems. We were finally able to use some leftover MDF board from previous projects to build a three-sided "box" to place in front of the pipe on top of our cabinets. I had used play-doh a long time ago to trace the edge of the trim against our ceiling so we could cut the appropriate edge to cover there as well. 

After a few coats of paint and primer, we had ourselves a white cabinet box to make our kitchen range hood look centered and neat. 

We will hopefully add some trim around the top of the box to match the traditional style of our kitchen as right now it looks too clean and modern. But for now, this box fixed our main issues. Total cost* of this project: $0

2. Utilizing the other half of our second blind corner cabinet.

For my birthday in 2020, I bought blind corner shelf pull-outs and had them installed. To this day I still love using them and they have been super helpful. We have one other blind corner cabinet but the same pull-outs would not work in the other cabinet because it was a smaller cabinet. 

However, this cabinet had space behind it we could use.

The open cabinet is the one with the blind corner.
We've never been able to fully utilize that space. 

This is the backside of the cabinet which allows us to
make a cut to use the blind corner.

We had talked about cutting a hole from behind and adding another door to create another cabinet in our kitchen essentially. This project never came to fruition because I wasn't convinced we had a way to cut open the cabinet to make a clean rectangular opening. This past weekend on Friday morning, I asked my husband again if we could do this project. I was also more convinced to want to do it as a way to use up some of the wood we had stored before we got rid of it all. 

By Friday evening, after the kids went to bed, we got right to work. It took us the entire evening to get the hole measured, prepped, and cut, but we did it.

Really clean cut with a multi-tool he purchased last year.
I have no problem with spending money when it can earn its value.

The next day, my husband spent the whole afternoon making drawer boxes for me. That evening, we had one installed with the sliding tracks. It took much more time than we anticipated because the drawer slides were nearly impossible to separate. We looked up Youtube Videos from different people with three different methods on how to remove them. After a lot of pulling, tugging, and frustrated grunts, we were able to separate the slides and have them installed on their respective halves. 

On Sunday afternoon, my husband finished making the cabinet door completely from scratch! We used an old piece of plywood originally from the house we had saved from a previous renovation. We added some trim to fit with the style of the rest of our house. I primed and painted Sunday evening and by Monday morning, everything was installed and complete. 

Comparable pull out shelves like this would cost $100+ each...(yes, we've looked into it.)

Yes, I've already filled them up. Will need to reorganize the
pantry now that I have more space. 

The secret passageway has a proper entrance! 

Total cost* of this project: $30.90 

I'm really pleased with the way this project turned out. I know we waited years before turning this cabinet into a reality, but now that it's completed, it's really exciting to add another 4 cubic feet of storage space!

*Cost refers to new dollars spent. All other materials we had leftover from previous projects.

Storage 101: Blind Corners

This is the first part of my 4 part series. To read the backstory on how we started reorganizing around our house, click here.

We have two blind corner cabinets in our house. We never used them efficiently from the start, but we never really had a reason to need to. Until we did.

For those of you who aren't familiar with blind corner cabinets, they are cabinets with a "blind" corner. Essentially, it's a cabinet, but then either to the left or the right, there is extra room but unaccessible straight from the cabinet door. If you're a visual person, I've created a nice diagram. 

This is exactly like one of our blind corner cabinets. The blind portion is almost exactly the same size as the area straight ahead of the cabinet door. So we were really losing out on half of the space of the cabinet by not using it properly.

In 2020, we gained lots of small kitchen appliances and kitchen gadgets as well as upgrading some to nicer/more permanent options.

1. We got an immersion blender, and to be exact, it was winter 2019 when we received it. It had no permanent home in our kitchen so it sat in the box on top of the refrigerator next to other miscellaneous items with no permanent home for almost a year. Using it was pretty precarious and we caused a few avalanches.

2. We bought an electric griddle. This griddle is advertised to store vertically in a slim space. However, the cabinets in our kitchen came with a shelf in the middle to create two tiers so this was impossible for us. The griddle is 15"x19"but none of our cabinets have a 15" height clearance. We attempted tucking it into the space between our cabinet and our refrigerator, but this caused more problems because we didn't want the kids to find it or it to scratch against anything. So we were forced to find a place to store it flat.

3. We upgraded our colanders. We had a set of three with stainless steel mesh, but over time, I realized stainless steel mesh was not my preference. We bought another set with perforated stainless steel which we absolutely love. I'm not going to get into the differences between the two here, but if you don't know the difference and you're curious, google them or send me a message and I'll tell you all about them! We didn't get rid of our old ones because sometimes I need more than one strainer in a large or small size, so it helps to have multiples. 

4. We got a kitchen scale. I. Never. Knew. How. Much. I. Needed. One. These things are amazing. I can weigh my baby food in exact portions. I can measure breastmilk and use a bottle without measurements on the side. (1 ml = 1 g) I know exactly how much my meat weighs when I vacuum seal it to freeze. I can double check the accuracy of weights from grocery delivery services. And I haven't even mentioned that I can bake with extreme accuracy! Can you tell how much I love this kitchen scale? And it was a gift!

We were able to store all of this in the existing space in our kitchen cabinets AND make everything more accessible. How did we do it?

We installed blind corner shelves in one of our blind corner cabinets.

I've looked these up for years. We looked into Shelf Genie. I googled different types. I looked up DIY videos and how-tos to get ideas for what people did with a tight budget. Nothing seemed to fit what I wanted to do so we put it off for a long time. Then back in 2020, when all this organization began, I decided it was time to purchase blind corner shelves and install them for my birthday present. 

This is the model we purchased. They're manufactured by Rev-a-Shelf.

Before buying them, I did a lot of homework, the main thing being measuring. We measured everything. I measured cabinet heights, cabinet lengths, cabinet depths, small appliance heights, pot heights, cutting boards, baking dishes. I measured a lot. Why? Because installing these shelves would involve rearranging pretty much every lower cabinet in our kitchen. 

And they're not cheap. 

There was one thing I couldn't measure and had to take a gamble on after purchasing and that was the space I would lose due to installation. Because this shelf rolls in and out on a track, it needs a few inches of height for installation. Nothing I read online in product descriptions stated this important piece of information. Our cabinets had double shelves so it was extra crucial this would work. 

So I gambled.

After they arrived, that was the first thing I did. I set up the track on the kitchen floor for a mock install, had my husband hold the shelf in place on the track because nothing was secured, and measured the height I would lose from the track installation: 4". 

4" is huge in the construction world. In this case, it meant my original storage plan of what I was intending to store on these shelves had to be scrapped and redone. Otherwise, we were going to be returning the most expensive birthday present of my life. 

So we went with plan B. And it actually worked out better than I thought it would have. We managed to rearrange all of our things, store the four extra kitchen purchases in our existing space, and make everything more efficient. 

We were so pleased with the way this turned out, and using these shelves is actually a lot of fun. The gliding is extremely smooth, and it really does live up to its name: "The Cloud." 

Now, you may be wondering how this can be more efficient since the shape of the cabinet is a perfect rectangle, and the shelf resembles nothing like a rectangle, which means you are losing out on square footage of storage. This was my conundrum for a long time which is why it took me so long to make the purchase. 

The answer is twofold. Yes, you are losing out on square footage because storing items directly into the cabinet and packing it in like tetris is the "best" way to use the most space. No, you are not losing out on efficiency because I can locate items located in the very back of the cabinet on this sliding shelf and take it out without displacing any other items in 10 seconds or less. This is impossible if I had crammed everything in like tetris: I would be left unpacking the entire cabinet to locate something in the very inside. Their design is the most efficient at maximizing the storage and maintaining maximum efficiency in an effortless way. 

My blind corner no longer disappoints me, but instead, brings me joy when I slide the shelf in and out.

When we have more time to complete DIY projects again, we can attempt the other one. I have an idea in my head, but it's not perfected. Anyone want to help bring my idea to life?  😀

Next time: The Pantry