Having determined that my kitchen cabinets needed to be replaced, and not just replaced but seriously upgraded, with none of the lost space of the present ones, I started by designing a new kitchen using Turbo Cad on my Mac.
I then let my imagination run wild as far as knocking out walls, etc. I decided that the present habit of putting up 30 inch cabinets, and leaving a space to the ceiling wasted too much space, so I would put 12” cabinets above those to take up the space and make it semi useful. The kitchen is small, and any wasted space is a detriment. Also, there would have to be corner cabinet access, so Lazy Susans were in order for the base, and either Susans or some kind of corner access cabinets for the upper.
First shock came when I measured the kitchen. I knew it was small, but I didn’t realize that it was built low. The ceiling was only 91 inches high. That meant that the traditional 30 + 12 cabinets were out, and I was left with about 37 inches to play with.
The final plan settled down to upper cabinets 37” high with a permanent shelf at 11” from the top and adjustable shelves in the lower 26”. There would be a door for the upper with a glass or plexiglas insert, and raised panel doors for the lower shelves.
In the base cabinets, the use of a corner cabinet left a 6” space between the end of the corner cabinet and the start of the sink base. While I looked for and couldn’t find a small stepladder that might fit in this space, to make access to the upper upper cabinets easier, I finally found a narrow pullout shelf that would fit this space. The (sale) price was less that it would take me to buy the hardware, so I purchased it and the susans for the upper and lower cabinets when they went on sale.
As a note here, the lower susans I bought were the 32” diameter susans, bigger than the ones you find commercially, but very reasonable on sale.
So much for the background, now to the woodworking part.
Wood is expensive, good wood is more expensive, and if I couldn’t afford to buy cabinets, how could I afford to buy the wood to build them? The answer I found was a sawmill. The mill produces hardwood for lumberyards, etc., and in cutting the boards to length, the ends are cut off and stored on pallets. These pallets are sold to cheap masochists like myself, who then turn them into firewood and sawdust.
I got my potential firewood home and stacked in the garage ready for planing. I have a Shopsmith Pro Planer, which will take wood 4” thick and 12” wide. The wood I bought was 1” thick rough cut, meaning anywhere from about 7/8ths to 1.5 inches thick.
Lesson: f you are so foolish as to follow in my footsteps, be aware that you are going to have to handle TONS of sawdust. By a rough calculation, the weight of the two pallets was somewhere between 3-4 TONS. So planing it down to 3/4 inch means that a quarter of that weight is made into sawdust. Add jointing the wood to four side it, and you will be carrying out over a TON of sawdust. Having a GOOD dust collector on a planer that allows for dust collection is a must. Having a way to dispose of that amount of dust is also a must. I have a ShopSmith DC3300 which connects to the Pro Planer dust collection connector.
)
