Some large kitchens really need to add a cabinet or more for a kitchen island. You’ve seen the large room with just cabinets and appliances around the perimeter. Well there is a lot of space wasted at the middle of the room. You don’t need to run plumbing, although you could, but that would make the project get expensive.
Try adding some base cabinets not only for additional storage, but you could make a breakfast bar out of it as well. Once you have the dimensions figured out, you can lay down some 2 x 4’s and secure them into the slab or subfloor with the appropriate anchors. The cabinets will fit over the 2 x 4 frame on the floor and get secured to it through the side panels. Once the unit is secured in place, you can use a brad nailer and adhesive, and install the toe kick and side panels to cover the screw heads.
You can choose to put whatever type of counter top on the island. If you have the room, it’s great to add an overhang for a bar style top. This way, you can add a few bar stools and people can have useable counter space in the kitchen.
If you have a cabinet door that won’t stay closed, it may only be a simple adjustment to the hinges. If that doesn’t work, you will need to get more creative.
If you have European hinges, you can adjust virtually every movement of the cabinet doors…including closing the door. However, if you have standard surface mounted hinges, you could install a mechanical or magnetic catch.
In my opinion, magnetic catches are easier to operate and place less stress on the cabinets. With magnetic catches, there is a metal piece and a magnetic piece. When they touch they hold the two surfaces together. They also open relatively easily. With mechanical catches, you will have a piece that usually has a protrusion that mates with a receiving piece. They are somewhat harder to push in and pull out, which places stress on the cabinet. However, they do have better holding strength. To hold a cabinet door to a frame, you really don’t need a lot of strength, just enough to hold the two pieces together.
The catch is mounted on the inside of the door and the mating receiving piece is mounted on the perimeter of the door frame. In this way, they are hidden from view when the door is closed. Unless the mechanical pieces are installed with the right spacing, you still may have a gap when the door is closed.
Cupboard doors do sometimes have a mind of their own. But falling down? That is pretty extreme. I’m wondering how much abuse they have suffered.
Cabinet doors have either fixed hinges or adjustable hinges. Either style can be abused and will cause some play in the hinge. If a door gets opened too far, it can place lots of stress on the hinge and cause it to become loose. In fixed hinges where the screws go through the hinge and into the door, the stress can cause the screws to become loose or even split the wood in the door or frame. On adjustable hinges the screws that hold the two pieces of the hinge together can become loose and pull apart. This will cause the door to become separated from the hinge and fall down or at the least pull away from the cabinet. Since these doors have two hinges, it isn’t likely that the door will completely fall off and hit the floor, unless both hinges are loose and damaged.
It is probably a good idea to secure the hinges back quickly to avoid any further damage. On non-adjustable hinges, you can add some toothpicks and wood glue and then reinstall the screws. For adjustable hinges, mate the two halves together and tighten the screws. Being a little gentle on your doors probably wouldn’t hurt either.
Cabinet toe kick is certainly cheap enough to replace. However, that does take some effort to remove the old toe kick and install the new. If the damage is slight, why not try to repair it?
A lot of damage to cabinet toe kick is from water. Maybe the dishwasher leaked, or maybe you repeatedly got crazy with a wet mop. If the damage is not bulging out, but rather discolored, grab some stain and give it a shot.
Toe kick is typically a thin piece of veneered wood. That means that the attractive finish is extremely thin and doesn’t go through the entire strip of wood. Think of a thick strip of wallpaper glued to a thin piece of plywood. You can lightly sand the veneer, but if you get too aggressive, you will burn through it and not be able to repair the damage. So the key here is to be gentle about it.
Water damage will appear as white stains. Use fine/medium sandpaper and remove the staining. Then get some stain and stain the piece of toe kick. It might be tricky to match the color, but stains are made in a multitude of colors.
Once you stain the toe kick, you can try to match the finish. When the stain goes onto the wood, it will look somewhat dull and a little lighter than the surrounding finished wood. When you finish the piece, the color will come out and it will be a closer match.
Cabinet shelves for the most part require very little maintenance. You stick them in the cabinet and the pretty much stay there unless you somehow damage them. Occasionally, a shelf might fall out of place.
Cabinet shelves use gravity to hold them in place. There are pegs that stick in pre-made holes in the side walls of the cabinets. The pegs slide into the holes and act as arms for the shelves to rest upon. So why would the shelves slip out of place?
Barring an impact to the shelf, it may be that the pegs are not level with one another. You find this when three pegs are on the same level, and one peg is too low. When you set something on the shelf, if it is placed just right it will cause the shelf to tip back or forward. Just make sure that all of the pegs are aligned on the same level set of holes.
Another possibility is that either the pegs are too short or that the shelf was cut too short. In either of these situations, there is the possibility that if the shelf moves too far to one side, it will fall off of the peg on the opposite side. You can cut a new shelf that is wider than the old one, or simply buy longer pegs so that when the shelf is pushed all the way to one side, the peg is long enough to support it.
Cabinet doors have a way of getting off-kilter. Little kids open the doors and sit on them, use them to climb onto the counter, and just plain open them too far. Fortunately, European hinges can be adjusted in virtually any direction.
European hinges are hidden, that is, you can’t see them while looking at the cabinets. It would appear that the doors are sitting flush with the cabinets themselves.
You can move European hinges up and down by loosening the screws that hold the hinges to the cabinet sides. You can lift the door up or down to match the other doors.
You can also adjust the hinges to move the door left or right. There is a stubby little screw (it takes a phillips head screwdriver) in the center of the hinge. You can simply turn this screw and watch the door move slightly to the right or left. You want this adjustment to leave you with a uniform gap if the cabinet has two doors that meet in the middle. You will want to test this adjustment by opening and closing each of the doors to make sure they don’t rub on each other.
Finally, you can move the door closer to the cabinet or farther away from the cabinet. Towards the rear of the hinge is a screw that is tucked away into a slight recess. It holds the two halves of the hinge together. Loosen this screw, pull the door in or out, and re-tighten the screw. You will probably have to adjust both hinges of the door for a good fit. You would probably only elect to make an adjustment here is the hinge side of the door rubs on the cabinet when it is open.
So your dishwasher looks great sitting in the cabinet…until you go to open the door. When you open the door, does the entire appliance tip forward? If so, you have a very easy repair on your hands.
The dishwasher is held in place by two screws. They screw into some brackets at the top of the dishwasher and into the underside of the cabinet. Like you, you find out they are missing when you open the door and the dishwasher lands at your feet. Securing the dishwasher is easy.
Make sure the screws you are using won’t protrude from the countertop above! Typically you have plenty of room, but be wary of the length of the screws you are installing and the thickness of the wood sub top you are screwing into. Solid surface countertops will have a wood sub top underneath them that are ¾” thick, so don’t use screws that are longer than this or you risk damaging the countertop.
Center the dishwasher in the opening and make it flush with the front of the surrounding cabinets. When you are happy with the placement, hold it in place and use a drill driver to sink the screws into the underside of the countertop. The dishwasher should stay in one place as you open and close the door.
Cabinet Doors can take a lot of abuse. Not only do they get slammed, but kids like to use them as a seat and even a ladder to get to the countertop. Is it any wonder that they occasionally need a little TLC?
Sometimes you can take care of the door by making adjustments to the hinges. It may be that the screws holding the hinges to the stiles have elongated the hole and now the hinge has some play in it. If this is the case, remove the screws and use some glue and toothpicks or a golf tee and repair the hole. Let the glue dry, cut off the tee or toothpicks flush with the surface, and reinstall the screw. If you use the golf tee, you probably want to pre-drill a hole for the screw.
As a last resort, you can install a cabinet catch. This is a two-part mechanism that catches and holds the door to the frame. The most common ones use a magnet that mounts to the door’s frame and the other part mounts to the cabinet opening frame. When the cabinet door closes the two mating parts connect and the door holds firmly to the cabinet. They install with a couple of screws and will take just a few minutes to complete. Just remember to pre-drill the holes.
Cabinet drawers can take a beating. They are typically built with inexpensive materials and stapled together. You can make them strong with some basic parts.
Cabinet drawers can get overloaded with silverware, cookbooks, or virtually anything you need to store. Slam these drawers a few times and this jostles the weighty contents around and weakens the fasteners…leading you to repair them.
Common drawer repairs range from the drawer sides coming apart from the back or front, and the drawer bottom sagging from the groove it sits in.
You can buy some small angle brackets and install them at the corners. You can mount these on the inside of the drawer box or the outside (if they don’t get in the way of the sliding drawer’s operation). Use small screws so that they don’t penetrate through the other side of the wood. Tighten the screws until snug only.
To secure the drawer front to the box, you can add a washer. In many cases the front will become loose after multiple slammings and this will pull the screw head partially into the wood, which gives the drawer front some play. You can place a washer under the screw head which will stop the screw from pulling into the wood.
Some homeowners moved into a house and they noticed that the cabinet handles were all loose. So, they used a screw driver and tried to tighten them up but to no avail. The problem was that the screws were too long.
This is actually a common problem with folks that have never done this before. The screws that come with the cabinet pulls or handles are too long for a snug fit. I can think of three fixes for this problem
The first fix is to get shorter screws. This would be the easiest and fastest method. I would take the handle with me and try out the various screw sizes to make sure you are buying the right ones.
The second fix would be to use some washers to make up for the gap between the back of the cabinet and the screw head. Remove the screw from the handle, place a few washers on the screw and screw it back in.
The third fix would be to cut the screw down to the correct size. This is a little tricky and time consuming. Remove the screw from the handle and thread a nut that exactly fit’s the screw (this will replicate the threads inside the handle). With the nut threaded on the screw, use a grinder or cut off wheel and cut the screw to fit. The end of the screw will now be a mess and will not thread back into the handle. However, since the nut is at the base of the screw, by unscrewing it, it will repair the ends of the threads and allow it to screw back into the handle.