09/26/2019
This is a tall pantry for a kitchen remodel here in town that I’m doing the cabinets for. It’s made of walnut, walnut veneer ply and birch ply The front pieces—face frame, doors and drawer front—are all walnut, the sides are walnut ply and the drawer sides and backs are birch ply.
The overall height is 88” and there will be moulding to take it all the way to the 90” ceiling added during the install. It is 40” wide. It will be against a wall to the right, which is why the right stile on the face frame is wider than the rest. Also, it will butt up against a countertop on the left. Because the countertop overhangs the existing cabinets (which will remain but I will be refacing with walnut doors and drawer fronts to match this cabinet), there is a 3/4” gap between the left stile and the lower cabinet. That will be covered with a sort of double-sided scribe molding. Speaking of scribe molding, I intentionally cut the right hand stile wide enough that I could rip the scribe molding that will go against the wall from it so the grain matches. This is such highly figured wood that I wanted that match.
I resawed the door panels from 8/4 walnut so that I could book match them. Also, the two door stiles are a bit lighter than the rest, but no where near as much as it appears in the photo.
The bottom drawer is 12” deep and the pull out shelves are 6” deep each. The customer hasn’t picked out her hardware yet. In fact, she’s coming over at my request tomorrow to get an idea of the scale of this cabinet so she can choose appropriately sized pulls.
The runners and hinges are all Blum BLUMOTION soft close, and the runners are full extension. The overlay on the doors and drawer is about 18mm. I rarely do cabinet doors and drawers that are overlay, but since the rest of the cabinets in the kitchen are overlay, and will be after I do the reface, obviously these had to be as well.
The unit is being installed where the refrigerator was. The fridge has been moved down to the end of the row of cabinets and I’ll be building a cabinet to surround it along with the obligatory (and most useless in the kitchen, IMO) upper cabinets over the fridge.
The size of this unit was the biggest challenge. After getting the carcass assembled, I had to move it into the house to have enough room to get around it to work. I assembled the face frame in place to ensure it was a perfect fit, then removed it and took it back to the shop to apply the finish.
Possibly the most observant of you are thinking, hey Rich, if that has to be brought in to the kitchen horizontally, and it’s only 2” shorter than the ceiling, how the hell are you going to stand it up? Haven’t you heard of the Pythagorean Theorem? Well, as it turns out, the adjacent dining space has 10’ ceilings, so the installers can stand it up there and slide it over and into place.
