Rosedale cabinets and “stainless” appliances

Over the summer I bought a bunch of kitchen cabinet kits from Bonnie Lavish. The first set went into the Fairfield. (And they turned out pretty nice, if I do say so myself!) At the beginning of December I finally got around to starting on the Rosedale’s cabinets and appliances (also Bonnie’s kits), but I didn’t make much progress until this week.

Here’s the layout I came up with. I really didn’t want the stove and fridge right next to each other but due to space constraints, it was the only way to do it.

Since the Rosedale is a modern house, I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon with stainless steel appliances. I bought some Krylon spray paint that claimed to be stainless steel colored. (It even has a picture of a fridge on the bottle!)

Concerned that the small kit pieces would blow away, I attached them to a piece of paper with putty.

Then I sprayed them. Um, yuck. The paint came out dark and very speckled. It looks more like asphalt than stainless steel.

When the pieces had dried, I sanded off much of the spray paint and repainted with some Testors chrome paint I had leftover from a model car project. It came out a bit lighter and more silvery than actual stainless appliances, but much better than the spray paint. Next I painted the oven window, stovetop, and fridge grill black.

Here are the assembled appliances. The stove had five knobs burned into the wood but I wanted to be able to add my own knobs and a digital clock at the top, so I turned that piece upside down for a blank surface at the top. Initially I painted the stove handles black but didn’t like it, so later I painted over them with the silver paint.

Back to the cabinets. When I came up with this layout, I thought the cabinets on the perpendicular walls would just meet at the corner, but in reality they overlapped slightly.

I used the disc sander to sand off a bit of the back of the overlapping cabinet, and now they fit nicely. Of course, I then had to do this on the other two cabinets against that wall so they’d all line up in the front. Hopefully it won’t impact the counter top and sink too much…

To attach the corner pieces at a right angle, I glued a piece of scrap wood to the side of one of the cabinets.

Then I attached the other cabinet to the scrap wood.

Once these were glued together, I bashed the toe-kicks so they would meet nicely.

The cabinets on either side of the sink are a custom size that Bonnie created for me to fit into this tight space. The assembly was still a hair too large, but I was able to modify the trim at the bottom of the room divider so they fit perfectly. (For comparison, the divider originally had trim all the way around at the bottom.)

I added glue to the sides of the remaining cabinets and slid the assembly into place to dry.

Next I built the top cabinets, and glued in the window trim so I could make sure the custom-sized cabinets on either side would fit. (They do!) I still need to go in with a paint brush and clean up the seam where the window trim pieces meet.

I’d planned to include a small cabinet and microwave over the stove like I did in the Fairfield, but it wouldn’t quite fit (for the same reason my lower cabinets overlapped at the corner, my measurement must have been a tiny bit off). I might have chosen to do something different with the upper cabinets if I’d realized this would be the case. Anyway, Plan B is to keep the upper cabinets on either side of the stove, and build a stove hood to go in between them.

Meanwhile, I painted the appliances with gloss varnish, which didn’t make them quite as shiny as I’d expected but I think they do a decent enough job of passing for stainless. (It’s all about illusion, right?!) The stove came with burners laser cut into the stovetop, but I didn’t trust myself to paint them neatly. Instead, I painted the innermost coils and plan to glue lock washers over them to look like gas burners. One burner is slightly larger than the others; I picked up two sizes of lock washers at the hardware store and think they look perfect.