The FeDibblety family

trim on cabinets is finally done

When Ellen turned 30, she built a brick wall. It is a very nice brick wall. It didn’t seem like the Spencer house needed another brick wall, so instead I decided to build some cabinets/shelves/drawers. This was the final part of the bathroom project. Ellen and Dave also recently redid one of their bathrooms. They did it in just under one year. We have them beat at 18 months (longer is better, right?).

Since today is my very last full day in the Spencer house, I finally finished the cabinets last night, finishing around 12:20 a.m. (today). All I had to do was put in the trim which I had just finished staining and sealing. There were some tricky parts, especially the one piece right next to the wall. For this piece I put a shim next to the wall so I wouldn’t mar up the wall when I was hammering. Also, I am still not very good at hammering. Even after pre-drilling the holes, I bent about 1/3 of the nails. Maybe there is a trick I am missing. At any rate, it is finally done. It is not perfect by any means, but it looks much better than before, and I am pretty satisfied with it overall.

trim around bathroom shelves and drawers

This weekend I worked some more on finishing up my final home improvement project in the Spencer house — the bathroom cabinets/shelves/drawers. The main thing left to do is the trim, which requires a lot of precision (and hopefully accuracy too). Yesterday I cut the remaining pieces of trim which I had salvaged from other projects, and then stripped them. I hate stripping. Especially since I was working in the cabin, and it was only a high of 30 degrees. I had a little electric space heater, but it did not really provide much heat.

Today I re-adjusted the drawers, since they weren’t quite level, and some of them didn’t close quite right. Since the wall next to the drawers is not completely straight, this caused some problems for the drawers. The opening near the top is slightly bigger than near the bottom. I probably could have fixed it more easily before I had put the countertop on, but you know what they say about hindsight. So I simply shimmed the runners for the drawers a bit, and that worked fairly well. Then I put all the trim into place, and marked where I wanted to drill holes. There are three pieces that go between the drawers that will be glued to the vertical trim pieces next to the drawers. I put 2 holes in each side of these cross-pieces, and 2 holes in the vertical pieces, and will then put small dowels in the holes, and glue them in place. I took Ellen’s advice and drilled the holes a bit bigger than the dowels to save room for the glue (and also to give me a bit of slop as well).

Now I just need to stain and seal the trim, then nail it into place. Almost done!