This is Jason guest posting on Kelly's blog.
About three years ago we moved into a single family house, which we subsequently purchased from our landlady last spring. The house is a Tudor revival (subclade Cotswald Cottage) that dates from the late 1920s or 30s. I figure there will be a lot of people from the western states reading this, and to many of you that probably sounds very old. I'm not sure the town I grew up in even existed in the 1920s. In New England, the vast majority of the housing stock is pre-war, and the build quality was superior back then to a lot of more recent stuff. Old growth timber, detailed mosaic tilework in bathrooms, six inch thick door casements, interesting alcoves. We really like living here, in fact about the only downside is poor insulation and high heating costs, as well as fewer bathrooms than newer houses (our entire neighborhood is 3BR/1.5 bath). Here is our house, a little obscured by the plum tree, but you get the idea:
The kitchen is not super huge, but we came from a much smaller apartment with a galley kitchen, so it was a big improvement. This is also only the second place I've ever lived that had a dishwasher. When Kelly and I were purchasing the house, we had it in our minds that we would like to redo the kitchen cabinets at some point. The kitchen had a nice granite countertop, and the dishwasher and fridge were in good shape and relatively new, but the cabinet doors were cheap plywood painted white. And not a very good paint job either. The cabinets themselves are solidly built (and much nicer than the 1979 house I grew up in), and look to be original to the house. I didn't get tremendously good "before" pictures, but here's what the kitchen looked like.
Fine, but not amazing. One day I was shopping at the Home Depot, and I was approached with an offer for a free estimate for kitchen cabinet refacing. Normally I don't go for these things, but Kelly and I had talked about it, so I signed up for the estimate. The fellow came over a few days later, took some measurements, and came up with a quote of $10,000 to reface the cabinets with MDF doors (in other words, fake wood). We thanked him and sent him on his merry way, since we didn't have that kind of cash to blow on kitchen fixups, although he protested that anywhere else we got a quote from was going to be at least twice as much. He was probably right, we didn't bother getting any more quotes. I figured, like most things, the internet must have a way to make this cheaper. So I went online and poked around, and there are quite a few places online that will sell you new cabinet doors and the supplies you will need to install them yourselves. I finally convinced Kelly this was a project we could do ourselves, and even if we had to hire someone to do the installation work, it would still be a lot cheaper. I talked to my dad, and he said he would be willing to come out for a week and help install. He's a pretty good carpenter, and has done a lot of projects around their house (including installing hardwood floors), so he and I both felt confident we could get the job done. Also, I calculated that we could do the project for no more than 25% of the Home Depot quoted cost, and get solid wood doors instead.
In hindsight, I have to say that this project was significantly more difficult than the websites selling you do-it-yourself supplies would have you believe. However, it was also significantly easier than the websites trying to sell you complete installation services would have you believe. Kelly really likes the look of cherry wood, but we both agreed that with it being such a small kitchen, we needed to keep it bright and a lighter wood would be better for that, as well as matching the existing white trim and appliances. I found a few websites I liked and we ordered some sample doors. We looked at maple, beech, and alder wood, and all were beautiful. Frankly, any of them would have been an improvement. Here are a few of the doors we looked at:
We ordered a few sample doors from
Barker Door, which has a lot of options, as well as
Kitchen Reface. Kitchen Reface is an interesting site. I liked their no-nonsense pricing approach (flat price of $55 per door and $30 per drawer front, regardless of size), but the only have 8 set styles to choose from. Originally when looking at the website, Kelly wasn't wild about the style options, but we actually ended up going with them in the end, and opted for the "Classic" style, which was a nice traditional style with a fairly light stained maple. It was a close call between maple and beech. As a bonus kitchenreface.com offered free shipping (which the other site did not) as well as free hinges. After choosing the style, I measured all of the cabinet openings, ordered the doors, and bought my dad a plane ticket.
Most of our drawers had broken slides, so I decided to replace them entirely. Kitchen Reface doesn't offer drawer boxes, so I ordered these from
Reface Depot, who somewhat hilariously drop shipped them from yet another manufacturer in Lousiana. They had very affordable hardwood birch drawer boxes for the same price as plywood. I also opted for the fancy underdrawer soft close slides, which were sort of expensive at about $30 a set, but well worth it. It took about a month for the doors to be manufactured, and I had everything shipped to work, because we live in the city and UPS won't leave things at the house without a signature. Surprisingly, it all fit in two carloads in my Hyundai.
Fast forward a couple of months and my dad arrived to help out. Our first task was removing all of the old doors. This was actually the physically most challenging part of the project. The hinges had been painted over several times, and many of the screws were stripped. It took us an entire day to get everything off. On several of the doors we were able to get three of the four screws out but not the last one. After several hours, my dad figured out if we just wrenched the door off physically with the right leverage, the hinge would rip right off over the screw and then we could back the screw out with pliers.
Here's the pile of doors.
And the high quality drawers:
The pane of glass in this door was held in with a thumb tack:
The next task was attaching the plywood end panels I had ordered to the exposed ends of the cabinets. In theory this is straightforward, just glue them on and secure with finishing nails. However, a few of the cabinet ends were in somewhat poor repair, and most of them had face frame overhangs, where the front of the cabinet overlapped the side of the cabinet by about 1/8". Here's an example:
The faces all need to be flush, so we had to build this up by cutting a piece of 1/8" hardboard to fit the side of the cabinet, then fit the panel over that.
Attaching the rest of the panels went pretty smoothly, although all of them had to be sanded and shaped to account for the walls not lining up quite right in an 85 year old house. By the end of the first day we had gotten all of these attached.
The next task was to prepare all of the faces for the veneering. Everything had to be sanded smooth so the pieces matched evenly. In addition, there was also some minor carpentry work that had to be done, mostly to repair damaged spots, and to remove some interesting extra pieces of wood that had been nailed in random places for some reason. The painted surfaces were also cleaned with TSP in preparation for the veneering. My dad did most of this work while I was at work one day. I imagine with a newer kitchen, not as much of this stuff (which is very time consuming) would need to be done.
When I ordered the doors and drawer fronts, I also ordered two rolls of matching veneer, which is very thin sheets of wood attached to an adhesive backing (about the thickness of light cardboard). This is what you attach to the face frames to make them match the doors. I ordered a few tools for this job in advance, including a veneer scraper, water based contact cement, and a glue roller to apply the cement. I got all of these from
veneersupplies.com. We first cut the veneer into carefully measured strips using a pair of long handled scissors I got from Job Lot. A good pair of scissors (with long sharp blades) is imperative for cutting veneer. I also had to purchase a paper cutter for making good straight cuts on the edges.
After we cut and dry fit the pieces, we applied contact cement to the surfaces, let it dry for about 30 minutes, then peeled the backing off and attached the pieces. It sticks instantly and pretty much irreversibly, so it's really important to line it up exactly right before pushing it down. The veneer scraper looks sort of like a giant putty knife, except with a very sturdy rigid blade about 4-5 inches wide. Basically you push down on the veneer as hard as you can with this tool to set the adhesive, which is pressure sensitive. Here is me applying some veneer, as well as the finished veneer (untrimmed).
We cut the strips with about a 1/4" overlap in each dimension, which then had to be trimmed flush with the cabinets. We used a razor knife for this, and it was a little scary at first. I did most of this work, and admit I made a few mistakes with trimming a little too close, but got better with practice. I think they might make a flush trimming tool for work like this, but we did it all freehand. On the exposed corners, where one veneered face met another one, we used a drywall taping knife to make the cuts without damaging the other surface. This is basically a large putty knife. I held this taping knife between the blade and the end panel, which prevented the blade from digging into the finish. For the most part this was pretty easy other than one non-right angle junction where I got a little too cavalier with my cutting and trimmed it too close. We patched it up with some stain and putty though. After flush trimming the veneer, we used a wood file to take the final edge off and leave the veneered face completely flush with the frame. We had read online that this method was quite a bit quicker than sandpaper and that proved to be the case.
The hardest part of the veneering is putting in the cross pieces and getting good butt joints. There are a few different methods, but we just cut them flush with a paper cutter, and dry fit them repeatedly, leaving a little extra play in the veneer (which goes away nicely when you smooth it down). If things don't match up 100% perfectly a little wood putty does wonders. After the veneering and filing was done, we painted the inside of the frames with matching paint that we bought at home depot. I had ordered some matching paint from kitchenreface, but they accidentally sent stain instead. This turned out to be fortuitous though, since it allowed us to stain some finishing molding pieces with the matched stain, and paint is pretty easy to match anyway.
After everything had been veneered and painted, all that remained was to attach the actual doors. This was the easiest part of the process. We just screwed the hinges into the doors, then drilled small pilot holes in the side of the cabinet, then held up the door and screwed in the hinge with an impact driver. The hinges have about 1/8-1/4" adjustment in each direction, so it doesn't have to be exact. These are the first doors we got hung up:
We soon hit a snag. There's a weird cabinet above the cook top that has two openings (the smaller one we use for spices). This had been open in the old kitchen, but I decided to enclose it behind a single door when we refaced. Unfortunately, the sizes of the openings do not match, and the middles do not line up perfectly, so I had measured incorrectly and the doors didn't fit the opening quite right. You can see the problem in this picture:
Ultimately, I'm not sure it would have worked even if I had ordered the door wider, because the hinges wouldn't have lined up properly. Luckily my dad came to the rescue, and we built a little insert piece out of some scrap wood he had cut elsewhere in the kitchen, glued it in, and veneered it. It worked perfectly, all that was left is a small seam which is covered perfectly by the door when attached.
We finished up this side of the kitchen, then turned our attention to the other side, where some of the trickiest bits awaited us. First the cabinet above the fridge had been broken, presumably when they installed the fridge, so that had to be rebuilt.
We rebuilt this with a 3/4" length of poplar I found at the home depot, and it was good as new.
Second, we had to deal with this weird end panel between the oven and the fridge, which makes up the side of a recessed alcove.
I had neglected to order a plywood panel for this section (which probably would have been a good idea). So instead we decided to try veneering a section of 1/8" hardboard that we custom cut to fit in this space. We had to do it in three pieces, but the seams are near the back and not very noticeable. It took a lot of sanding and filing to get the piece shaped right so it would fit in there, but we finally got it. I applied some Liquid Nails, and the piece popped right in, and ended up looking pretty good.
Finally, we had to deal with veneering around the oven.
This is a master veneersmith's worst nightmare. We toyed with the idea of removing the oven, but eventually decided to just slide the piece in behind the oven. The strips were almost 8 feet long, so it took a lot of care to get them lined up properly. I carefully cut out notches for the screws that held the oven in place, as well as a few other places that needed more clearance. Then we carefully maneuvered them into place. They turned out well.
After that, all that remained was to attach the rest of the doors, install the drawer slides and drawer boxes, and screw on the drawer fronts, all of which was pretty easy. I decided to replace the two very shallow drawers that were located under the oven with one deeper, more functional drawer, which came out great. We still have to attach hardware to the drawers and doors, and figure out something to do with the toe kick, but otherwise we are already enjoying a brand new kitchen which looks really nice. In the end we paid about $2000 even for all of the doors, drawers, veneer, etc. as well as another $300 or so in supplies and necessary tools. We ended up paying way less than what we were quoted originally, with much higher quality materials. Plus, it was fun to learn how to do a project like this, and satisfying to have done the whole thing ourselves. You care a lot more about the workmanship in your own house than some random contractor does, who is just trying to get done and get out of there as quick as possible. Here is the final product:
This took pretty much a full week of work to finish. I am very grateful to my dad who was willing to take the time to help with this. Not a very fun "vacation," but he is a good sport. Plus, I think he enjoys work like this.
Jason
