Designing and Building New Kitchen Cabinets

On Friday, October 1, 1993, I was talking on one of my ham radios when we got a phone call. I turned off the radio and TV to talk on the phone and when I finished, Kathy told me she could hear water running but couldn't determine where it was. We checked all the faucets, toilets, water heater, radiant heating, and even the outside sprinklers. We found no water running, yet we could definitely hear it running through pipes in the wall and floor.

I got out the stethoscope and began searching everywhere. I listened at every pipe, in the walls, in the concrete slab floor, and even in the exterior sprinkler pipes and the water main coming into the house. I could tell there was definitely something flowing in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. At the time, I decided the leak might actually be in the exterior sprinkler system, and maybe it sounded like it was in the wall because of some resonance or coupling between the pipes and the wooden frame.

Even thought it was then midnight and I had been searching for an hour, I went outside, turned on the twin 300 watt floodlights, and began disconnecting the sprinklers from the rest of the plumbing. After turning off the water main, I found I couldn't move at all the first two sprinkler pipe couplings that I tried. I did get the third coupling to move, but then I had another problem. Actually, then I had two new problems.

First, I found I didn't have any pipe fittings to cap off the disconnected sprinkler feed. I looked through a bag of spare sprinkler fittings that I hadn't used yet as the sprinkler was still incomplete. I found an adapter for a 3/4" threaded to non threaded pipe. Then I only needed a 3/4" cap. Naturally, the only one I had at that hour was already cemented to buried pipe. So, I dug up a length of that pipe and snipped off a section containing an end cap. After all, I was dismantling the sprinkler any way and could repair that pipe later.

So, I cemented the capped pipe section to the 3/4" threaded to non threaded adapter, connected the adapter to the feed pipe and turned the water main back on. That's when the second problem began. The house had some unusual water feed paths from the original owners. They had installed a water softener. Since it costs some amount of money to soften water, you don't want to use it to, say, irrigate the lawn. So they had rigged a set of pipes to guide softened water where you need it, such as to the bath tubs, and untreated water to, say, the sprinklers.

Of course, I had cut the wrong feed pipe, so when I turned on the water main, the other, still uncapped pipe end from my cut began gushing water. So I was back to needing to cap another pipe again. Again, I had to uncover a buried pipe, snip off a capped segment, and build a "Rube Goldberg" device to cap off the gushing pipe.

Finally, I turned the water main on and the sprinkler feeds no longer gushed or even leaked. Unfortunately, that did nothing to stop the original leak that we heard. At that point I turned off the water main and went to bed.

Saturday, I began calling leak detection outfits to see if anyone could help us. Most were closed. One did come out and suggested that the leak might actually be between the street feed pipe and where the main entered the house. I didn't tell him he was crazy to his face.

Well, it turned out that the leak was actually where I thought it was - below the concrete slab, underneath the wall, somewhere between the kitchen and the living room - though exactly where I couldn't tell. In fact, to repair the leak, several companies said they would need to jack hammer open the floor. This would destroy a section of wall, the kitchen cabinets, a section of concrete flooring, and, in my opinion, was likely to cause cracks in the copper pipes buried in the concrete which supplied the radiant heating to the house.

As luck would have it, I had begun designing and building a new set of kitchen cabinets, starting about a year before. The existing cabinets were about 30 years old and in poor shape. I offered a deal to the insurance company. If they would pay to replumb the cold water pipe over the house instead of attempting to repair the in-concrete pipe, I would pay to finish building and installing my own kitchen cabinets. Naturally, they jumped at the deal.

And so I was committed to actually finishing the cabinets.

The original cabinets had most of the flaws of commercial cabinets. There was a huge waste of space between drawers. The doors didn't open enough to give you complete access to shelves. The materials used did not have any resistance to water. Construction was of nails and staples. And, worst of all, there was very little consideration given in efficient use of space and usage patterns in the kitchen.

In my cabinets, I began by using 3/4" ABX plywood. This wood has good moisture resistance as it is intended for exterior use on a house. I also wanted every surface, hidden or otherwise, to be very easy to clean and not susceptible to stains and spills. So, I laminated Formica to both sides of the plywood. For the edges of the plywood, I laminated 3/16" thick strips of white oak. You'll see what I mean in just a minute.

I used actual joinery to build the units. Rabbets, mortises, tenons, and other joints were used to form an extremely strong box. Pieces were both glued with waterproof glue, and screwed together with stainless steel screws. The resulting units were extremely strong, very heavy, attractive, water proof, and easy to clean.

To make the maximum use of space, the whole design was "faceless" - there would be no wasted space to hold hinges and hide poor carpentry. I used European hinges for the doors with nearly 180 degrees swing so that all doors could open fully. Drawers were fabricated with metal sides with built in hinges. This allowed for a loss of only about 1/2" of space at the sides of drawers, rather than several inches loss with most commercial cabinets.

Let's see some of the construction and design. Click on any of the pictures below for a larger, jpeg version.