Momentum on the Christmas breadbox hasn’t been quite as swift as I’d hoped… first I was waiting for a Miniatures.com order to arrive, and now am waiting for a new ink cartridge for the color printer. (Way cheaper to buy it online than locally, but no instant gratification!) At least I managed to make a bit of progress on the cabinets and false wall while I’m waiting.

First of all, the lid came through its re-glue successfully! Geoff deserves all the credit for this. His gluing jig saved Christmas.

I cut this false wall from foamcore. There will be two windows — this square one over the table, and a casement window over the sink — with snowy scenes behind them. (Hence the ink cartridge I’m now waiting for.)

So here’s the stove hood I ordered from Miniatures.com. Now that I see it in place, it’s way too big. It looks totally out of scale, plus it gets in the way of the lid, and the yellowish color doesn’t really go with the appliances. Too bad, but I’ll save it for something else.

Luckily I had one of these simpler Houseworks hoods lying around. It’ll do, but it needs a cabinet over it.

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Because the Hallmark ornaments I’m using in my breadbox roombox have funky dimensions, I’m scratch building cabinets to go with them. This was my first time trying this, but how hard could it be? I started with the cabinet next to the fridge; we’ll go around the corner with a cabinet next to the stove in a future blog.

I started with two pieces of basswood – one 2″ wide and one 1″ wide – and cut them to the length I wanted the cabinet to be.

I glued these together, using spacers to leave a quarter inch at the bottom to serve as a toe kick. I could have used a smaller piece of wood for the toe kick but wanted plenty of overlap for the two pieces to attach.

The 2″ piece of wood is too large for my miter box and my little power saw, and Geoff wasn’t around to help me with the power tools, so I cut it using a hand saw, which was a pain. (I’m used to half scale & smaller wood!) To match the depth of the fridge, I needed a 1.5″ piece for the side of the cabinet, and I didn’t want to try to hand cut my 2″ wood down to that size, so instead, I used the miter box to cut two .75″ pieces to glue together. I used a utility knife to cut the notch out of the front piece.

Skipping a couple steps – glued together and stained, it looks like this.

My cabinet is 6.5″ long but the cabinet that butts up against it will be 2″ deep to accommodate the stove depth, so that leaves 4.5″ visible. I cut four door fronts and two drawer fronts, all 1″ wide, from thinner pieces of basswood. These doors will not open.

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