Quarantine Project Kitchen Cabinet and Bookcase Addition

Our kitchen is small by modern day standards and with storage limitations even with all the work done on it over twenty five years. Some of the appliances and other items infrequently used are either in the laundry area or the spare bedroom. A classic first world problem but I figured DW would appreciate my doing something about it now that I had the time. Fortunately the lumber stores I frequent were open and I also had purchased some of the material as it was planned as a Summer project.

The initial obstacle was going to be removing and eventually replacing the granite countertop.  The local place I had done business with over the years was partially open for business but was not allowing customers to look at the available slabs and did not do any slab removals. The reason given for the latter was unwillingness to take on liability for damaging the cabinets. The phone contact also noted that most customers worked through contractors who replaced both cabinets and countertops. He wished me good luck with the project. Here is the 2015 before photo of the area that would be revised. The first step was to remove  the bookcase section

 I remembered they had used a liquid nails type adhesive when they installed the granite 8 years ago. 

A  heavy duty reversible Bessey clamp was able to exert sufficient upward force to allow a thin kerf Japanese flush cut saw- to fit in gaps with no adhesive and cut easily through the glue.

Note condition of saw- it's reserved for ugly tasks such as the above.
Another obstacle was the granite appendage extending past the inland.

A worm drive saw with a diamond blade, a plastic sheet covering me and the area getting sawed off and several pssses along with a disproportionate amount of granite dust and - Bob's your uncle. This was an important step in the process- it allowed the continued use of the existing countertop while making and installing the new components and awaiting the replacement slab.

Next was making the cabinet. Given that the cabinet was going to be used to store appliances such as mixers, cookers, etc, deep and tall drawers were preferable to shelves and doors, though the latter involve less work and the additional expense of drawer slides. Inset drawer design and full extension ball bearing slides- again more work and expense than the alternative overlay doors- were used to keep consistent with the rest of the kitchen cabinetry. The top, bottom and middle horizontal partition of the cabinet frame have cutouts both to facilitate further assembly steps as well as cutting down on the weight of the piece.

The skeleton and boxes and drawer faces were made and finish applied in the shop. 

Watco applied to so much surface area made for a very unpleasantly smelly workspace even with all doors and windows open. It also made for a crowded shop. So the bookcase would have to wait until the shop was cleared of the cabinet components.

Once the smell dissipated, the drawer and slides were installed with the cabinet shell in its place in the kitchen.  The drawer boxes were installed with the faces trimmed and fitted. Besides being easier on my back to install w/o drawers, there are inevitable shifts and need for slide adjustments and inset design leave very small margins for error.

The bookcase design is simple and construction easy thanks to my Festool loose tenon joiner. The difficult aspect is fitting it into a corner that's not quite square and a 50 year old ceiling with a bit of sag in two directions and doing so with 1/8th inch tolerances. Another item which needed assembly in place. Again, something that would have been way more difficult without using loose tenons. 

The conversion fro bookcase to cabinet  provided an opportunity to remedy a narrow storage space by extending the existing island another couple of inches. Hopefully, the newer cherry wood will age to match the existing and sun-darkened cherry.

 I had attempted to use part of the old door but  this happened. I was using the table saw to trim the  rail remnants off and while flipping the piece over the tip caught the blade and shattered it. Scary as wood shards shot all over.

Fortunately the only thing damaged was the stile but that meant none of the old door could be used. 

All's well that ends well. Here is the revised and widened existing island area

and the new storage and bookcase.

In the TolstoyTogether timeline of reading War and Peace, begun on day 18 and completed for the most part  on day 74.

The qualifiers are still waiting on door hardware,  a possible base drawer for me to make and new countertop installed. The latter part will happen after W&P is completed. In the meantime, there's a ebonized oak plank to cover the portion extending past the existing countertop making the kitchen presentable for the month or so that it take for Marble Center Inc to measure, make and install the new countertop. 

In my younger, scuffling days, I might have left it at this stage, but our attraction to soapstone prevailed.