The cabinets arrive! Time to set the Bases!

The cabinets arrived early one morning.  I was so excited, I took off work early in order to start the installation.   This was going to be another frustrating moment, because once I install the base cabinets, I needed to schedule the counter top people to come measure and then fabricate the piece.

I started pulling back the carpet and mounting the cabinets.  Of course, I schedule the counter top people to come out and measure the NEXT day after getting the cabinets, so the pressure was on to complete the installation that evening!

Because the cabinets will sit further out from the wall, I had to fabricate "stand offs" in order to mount the cabinets to.  You will see how this takes shape soon.








Here is a picture of the base cabinet mounted to the stand off.  The stand off is mounted to the wall.  In usual TJ fashion, you could mount a truck to these babies and they wouldn't budge.







Another pet peeve of mine is the lack of "level" this newly constructed house of mine has.  Its not off much, but Im kind of a freak about it.

 Now, at the ends of each base cabinet, will be a pillar made out of painted wood.  Because the pillars only come in certain lengths, I fabricated some blocking at the bottom (that will be covered by base molding) in order to raise the pillar to the counter top height.

I learned the hard way that the surface of a table saw can be unforgiving when feeding painted wood through it.  While, I did order certain size pillar stock, I did have to cut it down to size. and depth.

I also had some problems with the pillars and the quality control.  As you can see below, there were some major inconsistencies with the sizes of the pillar stock.  Of course, I needed to modify everything to make sure it was perfect.




One side was 3 inches, which is what the whole pillar should be, but the other side tapered down to 2 3/4 - totally unacceptable.



I cant imagine how they did it, but Im guessing that the jig they put these things in for fabrication must have been off.




A hard to visualize top view of the pillar on the right side of the cabinet. (Below)




















Pillar installed on top of blocking

Now that I have the pillars installed on both sides of both cabinets, I needed to fabricate a wall that the fireplace would attach to - between the cabinets.  I made this out of 2 X 6 stock.

Throw the melamine plywood on the wall, install the base board molding and pull & cut the carpet against the cabinet, Pop the fireplace on and I would call this part complete!

Now we have to wait for the counter top to come in!  Another 2 weeks!!!!