(no subject)
Feb. 25th, 2018 08:23 pmI got up at 6 this morning and went over to my brother's house to help install the upper cabinets in his kitchen.
They got these neat cabinets that are made from nice face-grade plywood, which means they're about half the weight of MDF. They're quite easy to put up. But, like traditional cabinets, they're each individual units: you screw each to the wall, then to the adjacent cabinet. The drag with that, compared to some of the newer systems in which you screw a big aluminum ledger strip to the wall and hang all the cabinets from it, is that placement of the first cabinet is critical because as you add cabinets onto one side, any error is magnified. We put up one cabinet in the corner, the logical starting point, and spent a LOT of time ensuring that it was level and the right height, and parallel to the wall locally. We got three more cabinets up adjacent to it, and then I had to take off, which was okay because the next one was the one over the oven, which has to get a vent hole cut in the top for the microwave exhaust.
Then we went out with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
basefinder and his wife and threemeninaboat completely demolished all of us in scrabble. ("Ferocity" across both a double and a triple word score.)
We got home a bit early and I texted my sis-in-law to ask how things were going. She texted back "lots of tears."
The cabinet we'd put in, we'd aligned with the wall, but the wall had a large curve in it, so by the time they'd put another cabinet or two up, the back was about 3cm away from the wall, and was clearly not going to stay attached to the wall, so they'd had to take everything down and were starting over.
I went back over and we spent some more time measuring. I had the idea of clamping three cabinets together and levering the whole works up in the middle to span the problem area, and then putting up the cabinets on either side of those, to see how the whole run would work as a group and use that as the alignment system, and that worked well. We managed to get all seven up with only slight gaps on the ends, that can be corrected by trim, and most importantly, all are very solidly connected into the studs behind.
I have to admit cabinets and their cantilevered loading scare me.
They got these neat cabinets that are made from nice face-grade plywood, which means they're about half the weight of MDF. They're quite easy to put up. But, like traditional cabinets, they're each individual units: you screw each to the wall, then to the adjacent cabinet. The drag with that, compared to some of the newer systems in which you screw a big aluminum ledger strip to the wall and hang all the cabinets from it, is that placement of the first cabinet is critical because as you add cabinets onto one side, any error is magnified. We put up one cabinet in the corner, the logical starting point, and spent a LOT of time ensuring that it was level and the right height, and parallel to the wall locally. We got three more cabinets up adjacent to it, and then I had to take off, which was okay because the next one was the one over the oven, which has to get a vent hole cut in the top for the microwave exhaust.
Then we went out with
basefinder and his wife and threemeninaboat completely demolished all of us in scrabble. ("Ferocity" across both a double and a triple word score.)We got home a bit early and I texted my sis-in-law to ask how things were going. She texted back "lots of tears."
The cabinet we'd put in, we'd aligned with the wall, but the wall had a large curve in it, so by the time they'd put another cabinet or two up, the back was about 3cm away from the wall, and was clearly not going to stay attached to the wall, so they'd had to take everything down and were starting over.
I went back over and we spent some more time measuring. I had the idea of clamping three cabinets together and levering the whole works up in the middle to span the problem area, and then putting up the cabinets on either side of those, to see how the whole run would work as a group and use that as the alignment system, and that worked well. We managed to get all seven up with only slight gaps on the ends, that can be corrected by trim, and most importantly, all are very solidly connected into the studs behind.
I have to admit cabinets and their cantilevered loading scare me.
