Hi. I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop.
I had a co-worker of mine who in here work decided that they were going to go ahead and move to a different location. They had some extra cabinets left that they had nowhere to go with. So basically, you take it, you come take it apart and get it out here before the new renter wants to come and it’s yours. The only problem is when you saw it up, it looked great. But when you take all of this cabinet support and get them down into small pieces, they don’t look so great. She had a dream of what she wanted to do with them, that’s where I came in. We’re going to try to get creative with these parts and pieces and make something that you can use. Let’s get to work.
A quick bit of advice, when you’re going to take down some cabinets and you’re going to redesign them and use them in a different fashion in what they’re originally designed for, make sure you grab as many parts and pieces that are of the same finish as possible. You never know—even additional cabinets if they’re available, it’s almost they don’t cost you anything. You never know what you can pull apart from them with a matching finish that you can use to save you expense in the future so that you don’t have to go purchase something and stain it and finish it to match to finish off your project. Luckily enough, her father saved a lot of additional material, shelving and panels and everything else and trim that he saw from adjacent areas. And I actually think that we got enough to do this project with maybe purchasing just a small amount of material.
In your home after laying these out in several different fashions, this is kind of what we came up with, with a hutch type material. These are open shelves, this has doors and doors and doors. When we lay all of these together, I stripped all the trim off of them, took all the doors and all the shelves. And basically what I’m going to do now is I’m going to anchor these boxes together, and then I’m going to have to build a base on the bottoms to raise it up off the floor so it looks more like a base cabinet and less like wall cabinets sitting on the floor. That was our original design. I’m going to go ahead and put these together and show you what it looks like.
The first thing that I did was I went ahead and I took some medium density fiber board and I created a base to raise these up off the floor. As you can see right here now, the term in the height of this wasn’t necessarily what I wanted. What it was, it was the height of the trim material that I had so I covered that up all way to the floor. And also, the height of the shelving, which I’m going to use as a finish side on both sides. I come to find out that this height, the trim would work and this shelving materials are actually just a little longer than what I need, so I can cut these off creating two finished sides.
Okay. Now what I’ve done is I went ahead and I screwed this new base that I made, this new lifter to the bottom of the cabinet from impact. And then with cutting very little off of that shelving material, I was able to make a finished side that goes from top to bottom spanning both of the cabinets. I also screwed that from the inside so you don’t see any screws on the outside of the cabinet. I also screwed that from the back. Now, what I’m going to do is that this piece of trim that were saved off an adjacent area, this is going to come down to the bottom and this is going to cover that base area. I sawed to cut this to length, fairly leaping over the cabinet giving a nice clean finish to it. Now that I have this one side completely made, what I’m going to do is I’m going to make the other side and they’re going to be made in two separate units so that they’re not so heavy to transport so that we’re not twisting in between all these weight.
Here, we are down on the project and this is Young Owen. He lives here on this project. Although typically, what I would do is I would take this cabinet, I would cut the baseboard out and I would mount it to the wall. This unit, she wants it to have it removable so that she could take it with here to her next house or apartment or wherever she moves. Having said that, what that does is since this cabinet unit is only 13 inches deep, it makes it unstable, a little too unstable when you have young people living in a house. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to find me a couple of studs in this wall, I’m going to use some gutter anchors, I’ll show you that, and show you how we’re going to anchor it temporarily to this wall not marking the wall any more than say a typically picture being removed would cause damage when you move. After finding the stud in this wall, I’ve set the unit where it had to go and I screwed a hole. This is going to sit an inch and a quarter off of this wall. I realized that with these four-inch screws, I could reach in there and grab the stud, but I don’t really want to see the screw in between the wall and the stud even though it can be removed later because this top is going to be removable.
What this is is a plastic sleeve for our screw and gutter now. I measure an inch and a quarter on this plastic sleeve. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to take my razor knife and I’m going to spin it around this plastic sleeve until it cuts through. I’m going to put this in between the unit the drywall before I run my four-inch screw in stabilizing the top of the unit so that when you look at it from behind, this being dark, it will kind of blend in with the shadows. Now that we got a couple screws on the top of this cabinet, it is nice and tight and we don’t have to worry about a tip hazard happening with young kids. We’re going to go ahead and we’re going to put the shelves and the doors back on and take a look at the finished product.
So there you go, reusing old cabinets. Don’t always be real quick to throw them away or even put them in your garage. They look pretty nice right here into place. She does have to have a top made for it but now she’s got additional storage, some handy dandy storage places right here real close to the adjacent table.
I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. Thank you for watching. If you liked some of these tips, please subscribe. Thanks.
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