The other pieces went up with relative ease. There was just enough room behind the toilet tank to slide the beadboard in place.

Next, I reinstalled the light fixture. It turns out my new wiring was successful. It looks much better now that it’s inverted and mounted higher up the wall.

Next, I had the wife drop a plumb line from the center of the light so I could properly center the vanity and medicine cabinet. Since the top of the medicine cabinet will stick out from the plaster wall a quarter inch or so, the wife painted the area behind it with the gray paint. She got a little carried away. This gave us our first real preview of what the finished room will look like.

After the upper and lower cabinets were attached to the wall, I cut and installed the baseboards. I also switched out the old off-white outlet for a pure white one.

We decided to put a small ledger on the top of the beadboard to cover the seam and add decoration. I bought some molding to accent the joint and the wife picked out a router bit she liked for the cut of the ledger overhang. She decided to just do a simple 45° angle halfway down the edge. I cut and installed it. It came out really good.

Here’s what the room looked like after caulking all the seams and gaps and mudding over the many nail holes.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

• Remove everything that’s not necessary or nailed down
• Scrape the walls and ceiling
• Skim coat the walls
• Patch the ceiling
• Remove the old tile (down to the studs)
• Remove the sink and vanity
• Prime and install the new beadboard
• Remove the toilet
• Tile work done
• Install a new toilet (x2)
• Prime the walls and ceiling
• Paint the walls and ceiling
• Buy and install a new sink
• Return everything to the room
• Bathtub refinished

I still need to finish smoothing the mudwork on the walls above the shower tile. When that’s finished, we’ll paint everything and rehang the accessories like the towel racks and wall clock. As far as I’m concerned, all of that work is cosmetic. What’s important is that we finally have a working bathroom again. There’s a tiny leak in the sink plumbing, but it’s nothing I can’t fix one afternoon after work.

I’ll admit to one problem I have with the room. I measured the height of the shower tile on the wall closest to the doorway. Apparently, the floor drops 3/4 of an inch from the front to the back of the room. I’m not really surprised. The old tile weighed a ton. As a result, the beadboard on the left side of the window is slightly higher than the tile on the right side. Our window blinds provide horizontal lines that accentuate the error.

What makes me mad about this is that I didn’t do anything wrong and it still came out a little messed up. Should I have foreseen this and angled the beadboard downward toward the back of the room? Would the angled board have looked bad? I don’t know. I guess the grass is always greener…

UPDATE: Bathroom Remodel 7: Finished

The pantry space is over three feet deep. We figured there was no reason to install such deep shelves, as we wouldn’t be able to reach anything in the back. And we couldn’t treat it like a walk-in pantry with shallow shelves, because the space is only two feet wide. My wife balked at the idea of putting in a false backing, since we’d essentially be throwing away good storage space in an otherwise small room. She recommended that we put shelves in the back for things we seldom use (specialty appliances and seasonal china), and build a movable pantry to maximize the volume of the space. This solution is actually closer to her original design, except that the pantry moves on wheels instead of on expensive, heavy-duty slide rails.

I bought some cabinet-grade birch plywood for the unit. The stuff costs $50 for each 4′ x 8′ sheet, but it’s worth it. Here’s a shot of the basic framework:

Here’s the finished product. The unit is about 16″ wide, 24″ deep and over 6′ tall. It’ll hold a lot more than you’d think:

At least I thought I was finished at this point. I built this on Friday a couple of weeks ago and left town the following Saturday. On the drive back home on Sunday, I realized that I hadn’t accounted for the cabinet door when I measured for the width of the opening. As a result, I had to take the whole thing apart, cut two inches off every shelf, and put it all back together. I didn’t really mind, as it gave me a chance to play with my new (to me) table saw.

This past weekend, my wife painted all the trim work and the pantry shelves. This shows just how much storage space we really have:

Here you can see how well the rolling pantry nests in the cabinet space:

Next, I went to work on the faux cabinet doors. Making the doors would have been easy if all I had to do was measure and cut the plywood, but it’s safe to say there’s not a single wall in our house that’s plumb. As a result, every angle had to be considered, and steps had to be taken to minimize the visual impact of gaps and panels that are asymmetrical. After a lot of measurements and re-cuts, I finally got the plywood hung:

I decided to use piano hinges. The doors are pretty heavy, and nothing distributes weight better than a floor-to-ceiling hinge. Plus, you won’t be able to see it after we paint, making the panels look less like giant doors and more like individual cabinets.

Next, the finish work began. We wanted the whole cabinet set-up to blend the modernity of our kitchen with the old charm of the rest of the house. To get that effect, we used bead board in our false cabinet doors. It’s a pain because you have to rout out a channel in all of the 1″ x 3″ trim pieces and make sure the beads run straight even though the cabinet doors aren’t exactly square. After many hours of work, I got it done:

Word to the wise: after years of working with bead board, I’ve learned that you must pre-prime (or pre-stain) the wood before you start building. The best way to do it is to slop on lots of primer with the thickest roller you have. That’ll get the paint into all the crevasses without taking all afternoon. If you wait to paint until after your piece is assembled, you’ll never get the color into the beading where the plywood meets the trim.

As a reminder, this is what my wife originally planned for the rear of the room:

Here’s how it turned out in the end:

Pretty close, right? We had to nix the idea of a sliding pantry with a false front, but I think it came out okay in the end. The rolling pantry and hidden shelves are very functional, and the white cabinets brightened up the room. It’s really good-looking when viewed from the dining room, where the custom kitchen cabinet area is framed by the built-in dining room cabinets:

It’s hard to believe that the our remodel is finally finished. Granted, we still have some little things to do in the room (build an island on wheels to rest beneath the matching pot rack, add shelves to the rear of the washer/dryer cabinet door to hold various sundries, and put a flat screen tv above the fridge), but that’s all cosmetic work. We started this project with the intent of taking the biggest drawback to our house’s value and making it the biggest selling feature. I think we accomplished that, and on a relatively small budget.

To compare and contrast, here are some Before & After pictures:

If you haven’t been following along throughout this series of posts, you can start at the beginning: Kitchen Remodel 1: The Plan

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 11: Really Finished

The plumber came on Friday and said our old faucet was irreparable. Since we didn’t buy the old faucet set, the warranty was void. We arranged for him to come back first thing on Monday morning, and we spent all day on Saturday driving around looking for a replacement set. We painted ourselves into a corner, so to speak, since we already drilled four holes in the granite and got oil-rubbed bronze hardware throughout the room to match the old faucet. We eventually found a decent (but expensive) replacement set ten minutes before the store closed on Saturday afternoon. It looks a lot like our old one. Actually, we’re keeping the soap dispenser and sprayer from the old set and just replacing the faucet and control knob:

If you remember, I had planned to reinstall the old unit myself. This “X-factor” led to us paying a plumber to install an expensive new faucet set and a new garbage disposal. I guess every remodel has a surprise expense. We’re lucky ours cost less than $1000.

I spent all day on Sunday building the door to hide the washer and dryer. The heat and humidity out in the garage caused the camera to fog up, so we didn’t get any pictures. It’s just as well; I made a mistake and need to pry off the faux cabinet doors and re-cut them. I was pretty upset about it, so I’ve decided to put it away it until next week. My wife’s family was in town on Monday night, so they were the first to see our running water. It was the first time in a while that we’ve been able to enjoy the splendor that is ice.

Last night I made most of the pot rack, but I’ll post those pictures when it’s finished. By Sunday, we should have the pot rack and all the pictures hung on the walls. That’ll go a long way toward making the room feel finished. After that, we just need to do some touch-up painting, finish building the doors for the cabinets around the fridge, build the pantry unit, and buy or build an island to sit beneath the pot rack. We’ll try to get most of that done in the next couple of weeks. There’s no rush on the island, though. If it’s done in a month, I’ll be happy.

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 10: Finished

It’s a blessing and a curse.

I like the look and layout of this design, but it involves a lot more detail work than I had planned. The faux cabinet doors on the left will hide a full size door with access to the stacked, front-loading washer and dryer. The faux cabinet and shelves on the right will be a false front for a hidden, slide-out pantry. The refrigerator will extend about four inches farther into the room to give the cabinets depth, and it’ll all be topped with crown molding to add a formal look. The built-ins will be made with pine and beadboard so it blends our new kitchen in with the rest of our old house.

I was swayed when we realized it would be cheaper than framing a closet for the fridge and buying a pantry that matches our new cabinets. And since I have some experience designing built-in cabinets, I wasn’t too intimidated by the complexity of the project.

Deciding on a course of action for the rear kitchen wall allowed us to configure the chronology of the rest of the remodel, and we got started. After work last week, we patched the divots and cracks in the wall and ceiling with mud. On Saturday morning, we sanded until the entire floor was white. While the dust settled, we went to the hardware store to get the new sub-floor and the finished plywood for the new cabinet design. The mortarboard is pretty heavy and annoying to work with, but it’ll hide the imperfections in the floor and give us a more level base for the tile. Here’s what the room looked like at the end of the day on Saturday:

On Sunday, we drew out where the new cabinets, counters and backsplash will be:

There’s no use spending a lot of time repairing the area behind the cabinets. We’ll get it all nice and flat, but it doesn’t have to be flawless.

We also got started on the rear wall where we had a lot of sheetrock patching to do. It was raining off and on all weekend, so we brought the sawhorses into the kitchen and worked in there. It was pretty cramped, to say the least. This was the room at the end of the day on Sunday:

As you can see, there will be some space behind the new refrigerator wall. By building it this way, we don’t have to move the dryer vent and outlet.

We changed our plan a little on Monday morning. We took down the faux wall framing and did more sheetrock work on the top right corner of the rear wall area. I also moved the junction box and rewired the old light fixture. After that, I tightened and replaced the framing. After a lot of measurements with the tape and the level, the cabinet area eventually came together. This is what the room looked like after we cleaned up on Monday night:

It’s all coming together pretty well. On Tuesday, the electrician is updating our fuse box and adding/moving a few outlets. We’ll spend the rest of the week skim-coating the walls and finishing the new built-in cabinets with crown molding and filler/caulk.

To recap, here’s where we are in regards to the plan:

1. Disassemble the dining room table and take it to the garage
2. Move all the appliances into the dining room
3. Relocate the hot water heater to the crawl space
4. Demo the existing cabinets and the rear closet walls
5. Remove the tile floor
6. Resurface the ceiling
7. Lay a new subfloor
8. Center the oven plug and add new outlets
9. Re-frame the rear wall
10. Move the dryer vent
11. Sheetrock/mud the rear wall
12. Repair and paint the walls
13. Tile the floors
14. Install cabinets and counter tops
15. Move all the appliances back into the kitchen

Our plan is to paint the whole room with primer on Thursday after work. You can’t tell how well you’ve smoothed out the walls and ceiling until everything’s the same color and the shadows accentuate your mistakes. We’ll do any remaining work on the sheetrock on Friday, and we’ll paint the room red on Friday night or Monday morning. This weekend, we’ll tile the floor.

UPDATE: Kitchen Remodel 4: The Transformation

If I remember correctly, I had some leftover 1x3s and some beadboard from previous projects, so I really only had to buy some molding and hardware.

At the time, we had recently bought a table and ladderback chair set from a thrift store on half price day. (Ah, the salad days…) It was a great set, but the finish on the tabletop was terrible. That deterred a lot of people, hence the low price, but we saw the value in it. We stripped it down and re-stained the top, but the rest of the table and chairs were painted a nice shade of green:

The idea was to paint and stain the teacup rack so it would match the table and chairs. I stained the beadboard the same tint as the tabletop, and I used the same painting technique that worked so well on my bar to give the teacup rack an antique look. I painted everything with a thick coat of brown paint, and then gently brushed on a thin coat of the green paint I had leftover from the porch swing. It came out great:

She was thrilled to have a place to show off her latest finds. She used to rotate them in and out depending on the season.

As luck would have it, there’s no place for this teacup rack anywhere in our new house. She wants to try to shoehorn it into our kitchen once we complete the remodel, but I just don’t see that happening. I’d say the odds are better than even that it’ll stay out in the garage along with her corner cabinet and the old table and chairs.

It was to be matching cabinets with bookshelves that incorporated a shelving span over the matching headboard. My in-laws were coming up soon, so I worked overtime to get it all done.

I figured I’d try to finish the bookcases/nightstands in time for their stay, and make the cabinet doors and headboard later. Here are the bookcases after a couple of coats of paint:

My idea was to make an angled ledger board that the center shelf piece would lock into with the help of gravity:

Here’s the center piece. It has angled ledgers on the ends that will hold it firmly against the bookcases without any hardware:

Here’s the headboard. The beadboard and curved accents match the cabinet doors:

And here’s the finished product. On this one wall, we now have storage for my wife’s sewing supplies (she made that accent pillow), a place to put all of our books, and a guest bed.

Naturally, I measured the ledgers wrong and had to re-attach them about an inch higher on the bookcases. But I think it all came out okay in the end.

When my wife and I moved in together for the first time, we tried to replace as much cheap college furniture as possible. Since we lived in a tiny, one bedroom, basement apartment, there was nowhere to hide the computer. Nothing looks more ‘dorm room’ than having a computer/printer set-up sitting next to your bed or kitchen table, so I decided to make a unit that would look antique and completely hide all traces of electronics. This was the design:

It was meant to be like a large secretary desk that would hold the monitor in a drop-down position, and the cabinets below would house the tower, printer, and a file cabinet.

It took me a few weeks to finish it. As you can see, I don’t really draw out the details of my work, so sometimes it takes a while to figure out how to put together the more complex aspects of furniture. I thought I took some pictures of the piece during various stages of building, but I can’t find them. Here are the pictures I took back in that cramped apartment. This is the whole piece. It’s my first and only experiment with crackling:

Here’s a look from the side so you can see the shape:

I had to paint the entire piece dark brown, then paint on the crackling, and finally paint on the antique white. It was a real pain at the time, and now I think it looks cheap. It didn’t help matters when I learned the brown paint was oil-based, but by then I was already painted up to my elbows. I was prepared to drive to the store with socks on my hands when I spied a small can of Goof Off under the kitchen sink. It wasn’t enough to get all the paint off, but it was enough to make me look less conspicuous when I went to the hardware store to buy a can of mineral spirits.

Even though I’m not too happy with the look of the piece, it’s always been very functional. This shot shows how the supports pull out. I installed a peg in a hidden channel on each beam so they stop at just the right length:

Here it is with the desktop lowered. I used a four foot piano hinge to make the joint strong and to keep it from wobbling. Also, notice my StartTac cell phone charging on the right. I was the last guy in America to have that phone. When parts broke, the folks at Verizon refused to fix them. I had to order a new antenna and battery on Ebay:

If I had set the monitor on the desktop, I couldn’t have angled the door. Since flatscreen monitors were still pretty expensive at the time, I thought that dropping it down was the best solutions. This shot shows how the monitor sits in a custom channel:

This was really hard to measure alone. I had to prop the monitor back on the floor against the oven door with one hand while I tried to measure the height, depth and width of the angled monitor with the other.

Since the pull-out supports are built into the piece, there was some vacant room in the framework. I decided to maximize the space. Pardon the mess:

Here’s a shot of the cabinet. In order to maximize my space beneath, all of the structural support was built into the base and desktop area. That way I avoided any obstructions:

Thanks to the openness of the space, everything is able to move freely:

Not bad for my first real piece. I’d say the most important thing I learned from this project is that doing it yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you save money, but you do get a piece of furniture that’s perfectly customized to fit your particular wants and needs.

What was difficult with this piece wasn’t the building; I threw it together in two days and painted it on the third. The hard part was knowing that it wouldn’t really be finished for years. I tend to get a little obsessive about my projects, and it was hard to accept that I had to quit after 90% of the work was done.

Back then, building something was like a shuttle launch. Everything had to be planned down to the last detail. To build this functional symbol of modern maledom, I had to wait for a three day weekend where the chance of rain was nil, buy my supplies on Friday night, and then work like mad to get it done before I had to go back to work on Tuesday.

Here’s a picture of the bar after the first day’s work:

Over the next two days, I finished the piece and painted/stained it. It was made to be left outside where the elements would take their toll. Since we knew we would be moving within the year, I didn’t think it would be wise to inset a mirror just to have it shatter in transit. So my bar sat outside, mirrorless, for the better part of a year:

People always ask how I got that Earth-tone red. I actually painted it with an oil-based, outdoor, brown paint, and then went over it lightly with a paintbrush dipped in red. That’s why the pine knots, accent pieces and beadboard ruts seem to have brown streaks in them.

The table-top area was stained with colonial maple, and it has a cut-out for a galvanized steel beer bucket:

The drawer on the left is real, but the one on the right is false. This shot shows all of the storage space:

It occurred to me that the hobos who slept in the alley might catch a glimpse of it and sneak over the fence at night to steal my stock. So I put in a barrier that separates the bucket drop-in area from the shelves beneath, and I installed locks on the cabinet doors.

If you look in this picture, you’ll see the other changes I made after moving. I finally installed the mirror, added a shelf to hold drinking glasses, attached a wine bottle opener on the left side, and added a bottle cap opener on the right side:

I thought it was looking pretty good at this point, but there was still something missing. After moving from a short-term rental (above) to a new house (below), I finally finished my bar. I moved the feet to the outermost edges of the framework to give it better stability and I added some crown molding.

Behold my (empty) bar:

Anyone who creates things from scratch understands what it’s like to be unhappy with the things you produce. Whether you’re a chef, a painter, a writer, a potter or a carpenter, the tangible results never quite measure up to the original, abstract idea. Of course, everyone who looks upon your work thinks you’re a crazy perfectionist or that you’re fishing for compliments because they take the finished product for what it is. They have no prior frame of reference, and therefore don’t know how much better it could have been if you had done this or had left out that. But as the creator, it’s hard not to continually change your creation to suit your evolving knowledge and style.

I’ve tried not to go back and work on my woodworking projects after they’re completed and, for the most part, I’ve been successful with that. I like to think that I didn’t revisit my bar and change it; I just helped it evolve over the years into a more elegant and functional piece.

Although I would build my bar differently if I did it today, I still love this piece. I made it with only a circular saw, a jigsaw and a screwdriver, and managed to finish it in no time. I probably put another 20 hours into the piece over the next few years, but I think they were all good additions.

They must have been thirty years old, and it looked like every owner of the house since then made some kind of change to them. My wife and I decided to demo them, but we realized too late that the hardwood floors had lightened considerably since the original built-ins were put in. Since the floor we exposed was darker than the rest of the house, and since there was no way we were going to refinish the floors after moving in, we reluctantly decided to build new ones.

Here’s the area after the demo. At this point, we thought we’d be able to find some matching china cabinets to fill the space. If I had known we were going to replace the built-ins, I wouldn’t have repaired (and later painted) the wall:

Here’s the basic framework. The backboard is made of beaded plywood. I was afraid I’d cut the holes for the outlet and light switch incorrectly and have to go back to the store for another sheet of expensive plywood, but I got it right:

Here’s another shot after many hours of work:

This is a closer shot. You can see all the stabilizing bars that had to be carefully placed so the drawers will slide smoothly, the cabinet doors will close properly, and the shelves will hold the weight of all my wife’s china.

I decided to go with a combination of paint and stain for these built-ins, kind of like our old corner cabinet. Here’s a look after the stain, but before the top cabinets go in:

Here’s a shot of the cabinets once the framework has been finished, the screw holes have been filled, and the joints have been caulked. I rounded off the lips on the table-tops to give them a more professional look. It was the first time I ever used a router:

Here’s everything after the first coat of primer. You can see how the medium-colored wood stain will juxtapose the ultra-white paint:

Here are the built-ins after the drawers, cabinet doors, and molding have been added:

Naturally, when I look at them now, I only see the flaws. Still, I consider this good practice for future pieces that I would want to keep.