Cabinets... finally seeing it come together

Last post left off with the drywall repaired walls painted. You can read it here. Now comes the exciting part; installation of the cabinets. One doesn't mind hours of labor after spending 8 hours at the office when you actually see progress. The thought of coming home from work only to spend hours sanding drywall mud and reapplying more mud to rinse and repeat the next day was... discouraging. But this part I didn't mind because I could stand back at the end of the night and say "I built that!". Enough talk, let's get on to why you're here.. to see pictures.

Our cabinets are from IKEA and are the AKURUM series with Adel Medium Brown doors.We simply followed the supplied instructions to assemble the cabinets. If you've purchased a bookshelf from IKEA, you're familiar with the illustrations and should have no issues with the assembly. But if you get stuck, simply call the store.

Hanging the suspension rail. I made sure to get each rail in to at least 2 studs. The supplied poster was helpful and instructed us to tape the poster to the wall.

To save time, don't bother painting where the cabinets will cover.

First cabinet in.

 

If you're wondering how long it took to assemble each cabinet, I timed myself putting together one of the four large cabinets that make up the island.

I needed to move the electrical for the outlets that were in the peninsula and the dishwasher. My experience running cat5 came in handy here. I was able to fish the line instead of pulling up the floor.

I decided to use 2x4s for the base cabinets in addition to the plastic feet rather than rely solely on 4 plastic feet. As always, anything attached to the wall should be attached to as many studs as possible

Large levels will come in handy

The island required a base since there isn't a wall for it to attach to. I built the base out of 2x4s and attached it to the floor. A good step here is to use tape to mark the outline of the island. I forgot to snap a pic of that so use your imagination.

Aforementioned electrical outlet 

Since the cabinet to the left of the dishwasher extended past the wall, it was treated as if it were a mini-island. You can also see the electrical wires that were relocated.

base for cabinet next to dishwasher

Always check for level. Floors and walls are unreliable.

Here you can see the outlet on the back side of the mini-island and dishwasher.

Back side of dishwasher and mini-island

My attempt to impersonate Grizzly Adams

Handles were a pita to install. Knobs would have been much easier

But I have to admit, the handles look nice.

At this point, you sit back and crack open a(nother) beer. I'm not going to make it seem like it only took 30 minutes to get to this stage like they do on TV. To get to this point took a few days. We simply didn't have the room to build all the cabinets at once. We did the uppers in one night, the bases another night, and the island a different night.

The next installment will include the lessons I learned and a recap of my trip to the emergency room. If you have any questions, leave a comment or shoot me an email.