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.

If You Hire a Good Handyman

If you hire a good handyman, he's going to come over to see your project and give you a quote. You're going to have to wait six weeks because that's how far out he's booked. He has lots of good referrals so you decide to schedule in his next opening despite being a month and a half away. But that's ok because it'll give you time to order the doors and pick them up.

After 4 weeks of back and forth with the store, your doors are ready for pickup. You rent a Uhaul because you don't own a truck and then you and your spouse load the doors onto a hand truck and wheel them through the backyard to the patio. You're very proud of your hard work, and even your toddler says, "Those are the doors Mommy and Daddy carefully moved out of the big van" without you ever teaching her.

The doors we moved all the way to the back by ourselves.

When the day arrives for your new doors to be installed, he will start to uninstall the first existing door and frame carefully. You ask him to be careful with the trim because you want to reuse it if possible. He does a great job removing the door and frame. Unfortunately, you didn't measure the door correctly, and he forgot to check as an oversight. So your door is 4 inches too wide. 

Panicked, you call the store, ask them if they have the correct sized door in stock. They in fact do have two on hand, so the handyman graciously offers to drive the doors back to the store to do an exchange for the properly sized doors. 

An hour later, your husband and the handyman return with the properly sized doors. He continues to install the first door and finishes it at the end of day one.

The next day, he installs the second patio door, which goes much smoother than the first one. He puts all the trim he removed back on and caulks around the edges. You can hardly tell it's been redone. When he's all finished and done, he gives you the final bill and didn't even charge you extra for the trip to the store. In passing conversation, you also learn he is now booking jobs 3 months out. 

He leaves, you clean up, and you proceed to paint the door, inside and out. Except you overlooked the weather conditions and realized you painted with oil paint on a cold, wet day. So the edges don't dry properly and were partially ruined.

At least the inside paint looks great. 

However, painting is really not that big of a deal to you, , and since you're doing it yourself anyway, you decide you will fix it later in the summer once the temperature rises to unbearably hot again and oil paint can completely dry in a few hours. 

And later in the summer when you finally get around to repainting a second coat on the exterior of the doors, you'll be reminded again of the wonderful handyman who installed these doors and how he was worth the 6 week wait. 

*inspired by If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff *