When we first purchased our home in 1996, our kitchen just didn't have enough cabinets for all of my cooking paraphernalia. So, my handyman husband went to work building cabinets across a blank wall. I don't know what I would have done without those cabinets because they held so many things that just wouldn't fit in the other cabinets. At the time, we had discussed building base & upper cabinets, but it was decided that we just didn't have enough floor space for those bigger cabinets. In the summer of 2009 we decided to add on to the kitchen area by making a new laundry room/pantry and extending the breakfast nook. (You can look at posts from that summer in previous posts). I was happy to have all of the extra storage, but then I began dreaming of more counter top space since we finally had the floor space we needed to install base cabinets where the original cabinets had been built. It was a while before I approached the subject with my handyman, but he seemed to be pretty receptive to the idea and so began the planning stages of our latest remodeling project. I had hoped that we could salvage some of the original cabinets and salvage he did! He just sliced those top cabinets right off!! (Well, it wasn't quite that easy). The base cabinets had to built from scratch because the fronts would be different than the old cabinets. They were designed specifically to hold our "stuff." I now have a drawer that holds the trash can, getting it up off the floor and out of sight and big drawers for cake pans and plastic ware. Handyman has done such a good job. It's not quite finished yet, but he's been letting fill up drawers and cabinets.
This picture was taken after handyman removed all of the doors just before the whole cabinet was removed. He was able to reuse eight of the original doors.
Here, he's got the base cabinets in place and is working on the electrical wiring so I'll have plenty of places to plug in my appliances. He thinks of everything!
Got the base drawers and doors in place!!
Three fourths of the upper cabinets are in place -- progress is being made!
The fourth upper cabinet is in place.
Here is the super duper huge drawer that holds the trash can.
And this is one of the other big drawers that holds my cake pans.
The countertop is just a piece of painted plywood right now. The permanent one is on order. It'll be a close match to what we have on the others -- nothing fancy like granite. We would have had too many other things to replace if we had gone that route. Randy is still working on getting the stain to match a little better and I think he's come up with a formula that will work. Plans are to eventually get the TV off of the counter and hang a new flat panel on a wall. We had enough knobs on the original cabinet to cover what we needed for these.
I'll post a few more pictures once everything is complete. We're still about 3 weeks from getting the countertop delivered.
Thanks handyman for all of your hard work!
