With a sequence of events, we need to clear our some more space in our garage. One of the main things that needs to go is a bunch of wood we've saved up over the years from various projects. Before just getting rid of all of it or giving it away, I thought we should try and finish some of our own projects which have been on our to-do lists for years and years now. We accomplished both of these projects this past weekend:
1. A "box" to cover the vent hood pipe that goes into the ceiling in our kitchen.
In April of 2021, we made the decision to vent our range hood vent outside instead of having a recirculating one. It was one of the better decisions we've ever made for our house because I love it so much. I can cook and vent the smells outside and you can't smell anything after a few hours. I don't regret anything about the project except the person we hired. For the last 1.5 years, we've been staring at a really ugly ceiling patch where the pipe connected into the attic. The pipe is also not centered, but that is secondary to the ugly ceiling.
My husband has mentioned wanting to build a box around it to hide the pipe from the beginning to fix both problems. We were finally able to use some leftover MDF board from previous projects to build a three-sided "box" to place in front of the pipe on top of our cabinets. I had used play-doh a long time ago to trace the edge of the trim against our ceiling so we could cut the appropriate edge to cover there as well.
After a few coats of paint and primer, we had ourselves a white cabinet box to make our kitchen range hood look centered and neat.
We will hopefully add some trim around the top of the box to match the traditional style of our kitchen as right now it looks too clean and modern. But for now, this box fixed our main issues. Total cost* of this project: $0
2. Utilizing the other half of our second blind corner cabinet.
For my birthday in 2020, I bought blind corner shelf pull-outs and had them installed. To this day I still love using them and they have been super helpful. We have one other blind corner cabinet but the same pull-outs would not work in the other cabinet because it was a smaller cabinet.
However, this cabinet had space behind it we could use.
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| The open cabinet is the one with the blind corner. We've never been able to fully utilize that space. |
We had talked about cutting a hole from behind and adding another door to create another cabinet in our kitchen essentially. This project never came to fruition because I wasn't convinced we had a way to cut open the cabinet to make a clean rectangular opening. This past weekend on Friday morning, I asked my husband again if we could do this project. I was also more convinced to want to do it as a way to use up some of the wood we had stored before we got rid of it all.
By Friday evening, after the kids went to bed, we got right to work. It took us the entire evening to get the hole measured, prepped, and cut, but we did it.
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| Really clean cut with a multi-tool he purchased last year. I have no problem with spending money when it can earn its value. |
The next day, my husband spent the whole afternoon making drawer boxes for me. That evening, we had one installed with the sliding tracks. It took much more time than we anticipated because the drawer slides were nearly impossible to separate. We looked up Youtube Videos from different people with three different methods on how to remove them. After a lot of pulling, tugging, and frustrated grunts, we were able to separate the slides and have them installed on their respective halves.
On Sunday afternoon, my husband finished making the cabinet door completely from scratch! We used an old piece of plywood originally from the house we had saved from a previous renovation. We added some trim to fit with the style of the rest of our house. I primed and painted Sunday evening and by Monday morning, everything was installed and complete.
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| Comparable pull out shelves like this would cost $100+ each...(yes, we've looked into it.) |
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| Yes, I've already filled them up. Will need to reorganize the pantry now that I have more space. |
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| The secret passageway has a proper entrance! |
Total cost* of this project: $30.90
I'm really pleased with the way this project turned out. I know we waited years before turning this cabinet into a reality, but now that it's completed, it's really exciting to add another 4 cubic feet of storage space!
*Cost refers to new dollars spent. All other materials we had leftover from previous projects.
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