Christmas Cabinets

December was a busy month.  I decided to take on a cabinet job, my first, to reface Lynn's kitchen.  As you can see the old kitchen had served its purpose and was starting to show its age and wear.  Lynn decided to do a refresh with new cabinets and counter top.  It was well deserved.

Here are some of the before pictures.  This kitchen is original to the house.

Tamera and Joey helped by getting the face frames stripped and sanded.

With the designs complete we headed out to get the lumber.  It was a nice day trip to my favorite mill.  We got a 120 bdft of maple and some plywood for the drawers.

Here are the start of the doors.  All the parts are identified and I can begin to mill them out.

Rails and Stiles are now all roughed out.  Final milling is still to take place.

Here is the start of the raised panels for the doors.

After the panels are cut out and the larger ones are glued up we can flatten them.  Wood moves after its cut so its important to flatten it back out.  Since I don't have a large planer this is done by hand.

Here is a cool tool I made (found the plans) to make perfect archs for raised panel doors.  It makes the profiles for me and I can do any door.

Here are the panels with the profiles router into them.

Next up is final milling of the door parts and routing the profile for those pieces.

Next up is the drawers.  The drawer boxes were relatively easy.  Just a box with a simple joint.

Then we see the drawer fronts.  These are also pretty simple.  Solid piece false front for the drawers.

Final look with the profile routed in them.

Starting to put some color into it.  Applied stain to the panels first so when the panels move with the weather you won't see spots where the stain didn't get.

Drying rack.

And here is Santa's Sleigh all loaded up for NC.  Missing from the picture is the hitch rack yet to be mounted with a trunk filled with our clothes.  It was my greatest packing masterpiece yet.  There is a whole kitchen in there!

Some minor work was needed to prep the new frames.  First off was the old false fronts under the sink.  I put Levi to work.  We took them off redneck style.  It was fun.

Test fitting the first drawers.

Dakota wanted to help too.

The girls helped too.

And then the final product.  Not many pictures were taken during the installation. 

Here you can see how much brighter it is.  This is after the sides of the cabinets were re-skinned.  The only light on in this room is the sun coming in the window.