Since January seems to be the month we start organizing, and getting things stashed away...I thought I would show you an easy fix for hiding a few things, that usually end up cluttering counter tops.
I like decor stuff just as much as the next, and I actually don't mind having all the empty spots in the kitchen decorated. The one thing I don't like looking at though, is all the small appliances.
Alot of homes have them built in to the cabinets, and sometimes they are above the stove. This house didn't actually have one anywhere. It did how ever, have a dinky little vent hood, which we ripped out and replaced with a custom made vent hood, which you can see
here. I know it may seem a bit extreme, ripping out useful cabinets, but those half sized cabinets rarely hold much of use anyways.
We bought a small microwave, and I tried it on the counter, but it took up so much room, that I had to find a solution. Obviously I would have loved a microwave drawer, but that was out of budget, and I was out of storage space to give up. There was a large area next to our back door that wasn't being used, and the door didn't seem to interfere. It seemed like the perfect spot for a new cabinet.
I thought about having one custom built (costly), but ran across an unfinished pantry cabinet at Lowes for around $200. They had two styles that were two different sizes. One was the depth of the upper cabinets 12", the other the depth of the lower 24". The deeper cabinet was far to skinny to fit a microwave inside, so we grabbed the 12' deep, but wider version and had to made it work.
Strangely enough, the style of door, was almost identical to our existing cabinets. I know this wont always be the case, but If you are painting all of the cabinets, it should all blend when finished.
The only difference in the doors, was the new cabinets had routed edges on the outside of each door.
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| New cabinets door |
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| Our existing cabinets doors |
It ended up being a 30 minute fix on the router table for all of the existing cabinet doors.
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| After routing our existing doors |
To fix the problem of the cabinet depth, we basically made a 2x4 frame behind the cabinet to set it off the wall, just enough to be flush with the lower cabinets, about 12".
This actually worked in our favor, since we could run cords behind the cabinet without having to move the electrical outlets (saving more money). Lowe's carries the side panels for both sizes of cabinets. We just bought the bigger sized panel 24", and once attached you would never know the cabinet doesn't go all the way to the back of the wall.
The cabinet got the same molding at the top, and the doors were all matching at this point with the help of the router. After paint and knobs, you wouldn't even know this cabinet was added later.
Now for whats inside....
The microwave was the main reason for installing the cabinet in the first place, and since the shelves were adjustable, I got the coffee maker, and some cookbooks in to boot!! The drawers held my coffee pods, and coasters.
The cabinet unfortunately only housed about a 10th of my cookbook collection, so I just used some of my favorites.
For the bottom cabinet, we decided to alter the door to make a pull out trashcan. I looked for the right sized trashcan system that you could mount onto the door, but had alot of problems finding the right size, and the ones that were, seemed crazy expensive. Since we were doing the kitchen on a budget, we opted for making it ourselves.
We ended up using two small sized trash cans, one for recycling. I did have to cut one side of the lip on each, to make them fit in.
I put a cup handle on all of the drawers, and used the same here.
Now unfortunately I don't have a photo how-to for this little system. But as you can see in the pictures, it is a pretty simple construction. We used a piece of plywood that we had laying around, and cut it to fit just inside of the cabinet, as the wood platform. A brace was added to the back of the door, on the bottom, to mount the platform system to. The whole thing is similar to a drawer, just without the sides. A couple pieces of 1"x1", were mounted under the platform, and are what the rails are attached to.
You don't want it to heavy, and its really not holding all that much weight. We angled one more 1x1 on each side of the cans to keep them from shifting around. The other half of the railing, was mounted to the inside of the cabinets, on another 1x1". This will keep the whole thing strong, and it will slide smoothly.
A simple fix to loosing counter space. If you don't have room for a whole new cabinet, consider using an existing one.
For the rest of the how-to's for this kitchen check out these posts...
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