Bird's eye Maple Kitchen Cabinets
The primary material I used to construct the case-work is melamine coated particleboard. I find this an excellent choice for the internals of kitchen cabinets. The high quality particle board coated with Melamine is strong enough and is inexpensive (less than $30 per 8' x 4' sheet.). Melamine is a tough plastic that was once used for high end dining ware. Unfortunately, melamine was not microwave safe, and as microwaves became more popular, melamine dining ware fell out of popularity. Fortunately it has made a comeback as a tough yet aesthetic coating for sheet materials. Melamine is easy to clean and does not absorb liquids like plain particle board or wood. This stuff is so tough that I was able to clean up a shop cabinet made of melamine coated particleboard in which a can of lacquer leaked. Try that with wood or plain particleboard.!
The face-work, i.e., the doors, drawer faces, are the first thing one sees. Here is where the furniture quality work is. I am not a big fan of lots of fancy raised panels and lots of window pane style doors, and lots of gimmicky drawers. Instead I was aiming for simple and elegant
I also decided to use mitered corners instead of the more common cope-and-stick found in most modern cabinet construction. I find that the mitered corners look more elegant. Note that although the mitered corners look simple, tight fitting miters are much more difficult to achieve than tight cope-and-stick.
So why did I decide to build the cabinets myself? Well, I am glad you asked. As we were preparing to have the entire house renovated, I pondered over whether I should just buy cabinets and have the contractor install them, or if I should invest the time and effort to build them myself. Money was a consideration, for it cost a least half what it would have cost to have the contractor do it. But more importantly there were many problems that I did not expect to go away unless I did the job myself.
Like many kitchen cabinets installed during construction, the original kitchen cabinets in my kitchen were plagued with problems. The goal of such cabinets is to be as cheap and as fast to make and install as possible. There is little consideration given to damage prevention, reparability, effective storage and kitchen workflow.
Often, cabinets are constructed of cheap, unfinished particle board and installed on a wood (usually also particle board) frame base. This is a disaster waiting to happen. In our case, the cabinets were installed on a plain particle board frame directly onto the cement slab, which itself will impart moisture to the wood. Unbeknownst to me until the damage was extensive, there was a slow leak in the connection to the dishwasher. The particleboard soaked up the water like a sponge, swelled up and started to rot. The bottoms of most of the cabinets on the north side of the kitchen quickly rotted and became moldy.
In a well designed kitchen, even this extensive damage should be relatively easy and economical to repair. But since these cabinets were built as a single unit, all the cabinets needed replacing-quite an expensive leak.
Then there is the issue of effective storage. I could go into a tirade here, but suffice it to say that the storage in the old cabinets sucked. One thing in particular, however, is illustrative of just how poor the storage was: The exhaust duct for the exhaust fan over the stove ran strait up the middle of the cabinet above the stove. Open the cabinet doors, and one would have discovered the inside of this cabinet almost entirely useless. There was about a four inch wide space on either side of the duct housing, and the rest of the cabinet was merely a space for the duct to run through-an entire cabinet, close to useless.
Last, but not least, is kitchen work flow. This is probably the most neglected aspect of kitchen design. At least it was with our old cabinets. Even something as simple as unloading the dishwasher used to be inefficient, requiring too much movement about the kitchen.
Enough about problems. Now for solutions.
There are two basic styles of cabinetry: face-frame, and frameless. I decided to use frameless cabinet design (a.k.a. system 32, a.k.a. "euro-style"), since it has many features that lend themselves to easy solutions to my problems. In addition, frameless case-work is fast, strong and economical to build. There are tradeoffs between face-frame and frameless design, but for many reasons, I prefer frameless design.
Since each cabinet is modular and independent, replacing a damaged cabinet is possible. Each cabinet is screwed to the wall studs, to the decking (the under side of the counter top) and bolted to the adjacent cabinet(s). Just unscrew the screws and lower the plastic levelers, and the cabinet slips out. Also facilitating repairs is that the frameless "hidden" hinges allow the doors to unlatched and removed in a few seconds.
Since each cabinet is modular and independent, replacing a damaged cabinet is possible. Each cabinet is screwed to the wall studs, to the decking (the under side of the counter top) and bolted to the adjacent cabinet(s). Just unscrew the screws and lower the plastic levelers, and the cabinet slips out. Also facilitating repairs is that the frameless "hidden" hinges allow the doors to unlatched and removed in a few seconds.
Effective kitchen storage, I believe, is achieved by accessibility. All the volume in the world inside of a cabinet is useless if one must get on one's knees and stick their head into a dim hole just to see and reach what is inside. (I am not kidding.) On this note, let me say that corner cabinets and corresponding lazy susans absolutely rule. They can store a lot of stuff, all of which is readily accessible. Other ways of increasing accessibility is to use "pullout" shelves in base cabinets, instead of fixed shelves. And about that old useless cabinet above the stove, well, just check out the picture of the spice storage.
Finally, consider kitchen workflow. It may take hours of thought to figure out what is simple in principle: minimize ones movement about the kitchen while performing common tasks. Take cleaning up after a meal, for example. Leftovers go into the fridge, scraps to the trash. Then the dishes get rinsed in the sink, and then to the dishwasher. When the dishes are clean, the dishwasher is unloaded and the dishes stored. This dictates the arrangement of the north side of the kitchen. Another concern and possible danger for a galley style kitchen (a kitchen that has through access) is cross traffic. Cross traffic can be minimized by proper layout.