The Victorianna’s kitchen sink will be centered under the window. After building the cabinet, I next needed to figure out how the window lined up with it.

The window isn’t glued in yet. I held the cabinet up to the window hole and marked the edges of the window on the back side. Then I measured from the edge of the cabinet to these lines, and made lines in the same spots on the front side.

The window hole is slightly less than 1.5″ wide, so I decided to round up and make this a 1.5″ cabinet (36″ in real life). I learned when renovating my own kitchen that this is a standard size for sinks.

I’m using 1/4″ x 1/32″ basswood for the drawers and 1/8″ x 1/32″ for the doors. I cut the drawers first and glued them on. Next I cut vertical pieces for the doors and glued these on, lining them up with the edges of the drawers. Finally I cut the horizontal door pieces to fit inside the vertical pieces. Simple, Shaker-style cabinets!

Next I cut the countertop pieces. As you can see here, the wall isn’t square so the countertop piece doesn’t reach all the way back.

I used the belt sander to sand an angle that contours to the wall (more or less). The crack of space at the corner will be covered up with the backsplash. The countertop is flush where it meets the stove, but slightly overhangs on the other side (just like in my real kitchen). I notched it so it fits around the bay window trim.

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When I first started working on the Victorianna, I bought a set of kitchen cabinets from Bruce Dawson, who sold under the name bedMiniatures (he’s since retired). I planned out a U-shaped layout.

Since then, I redid the kitchen in my real house, and learned a lot about kitchens that I never knew before. For example: the upper cabinets should be 18″ inches above the countertop, or up to 20″ if you have high ceilings and can get away with it. Who knew? In my dollhouse kitchens I’ve always just eyeballed it.

(Okay, okay, *I* didn’t redo the kitchen. Geoff did most of the work. But I picked out everything that went in it!)

Now that I’ve been through that process in real life, the kitchen I’d planned for the Victorianna doesn’t look as good to me as it did before. For one thing, the upper cabinets are tiny — this kitchen has the equivalent of 10′ ceilings, but the cabinets are only 30″. (In my real kitchen, which has 9′ ceilings, we used 40″ cabinets.)

I also regretted my choice of white appliances. I’d tried chrome paint for “stainless” appliances in the Rosedale and wasn’t thrilled with how those turned out, so I thought using white here would help me avoid some angst, but they don’t pop the way stainless steel does with white cabinets. Also, while I like the stove (made from a Mini Etchers kit), the paint I used, which was supposedly “glossy white”, came out yellowish and dingy.

Long story short: I decided to put all of these pieces aside for some other house and scratch build the Victorianna’s kitchen cabinets instead.

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