Kitchens

So what is the most intimidating part of building your own kitchen cabinets? 

Apart from the huge scope of the entire project, I'd have to say building and installing easy to use drawers can seem very intimidating.  Kitchen drawers get used dozens of times a day, so you want drawers that are both easy to use and will hold up over years of use.

For the Momplex white kitchen, we decided to use a drawer side/slide combo system, call Metabox drawers by Blum.

So let's just say you got a team of two building a kitchen, and one hates painting and the other can't paint.

Well, it's not that I couldn't paint.  They say occassional painting in a well ventilated area is fine for pregnant women.  

But up here in Alaska, in the cold winter months, working inside a poured in place concrete building, with no ventilation, where your full time job is to build and paint or stain furniture, it's not occassional and it's not well vent

Hi everyone!

I'm really excited today to share with you how we installed crown moulding on top of the wall kitchen cabinets - finishing out the seam between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling.  

But before we get to that - don't forget - today's the day! 

The Home Depot Do-It Herself Workshop - featuring a storage trunk plan designed by me (it super simple so very beginner friendly) is happening tonight!!!

You can re

Shall we talk kitchens? I've been promising you that we will make real kitchens for the Momplex, and blogging the tutorials and plans.  Every since the day I spent $7000 on cabinets for a 10x10 kitchen, I've been tossing and turning at nights, thinking, I could have made my own cabinets.  I've been thinking I could have made my own cabinets much easier, much simpler ... because it was quite a chore just installing the cabinets.On the Momplex, we have two kitchens, and we will be bui

Mom, we love you, but not this much.  There are trusses delivered and sitting up at the Momplex right now.  And nobody wants to see that roof go up more than me, but with temperatures in the heat of the day rising to "extreme cold" with a feels like temperature of -26 degrees below zero, even if we did love our Mom's enough to work regardless of the weather, our tools don't love Mom that much.  At these temperatures, air compressors act funny, nailers don't nail, drill batterie

Thank you for your comments and advice, real ideas that have helped shape the form of our first Momplex kitchen layout.

It took us two tries to get you all the deets on installing the Microhood ... good thing we got two moms and two Momplex units to finish up!

Microhoods to me are like toilets or power lines or my big toes....  function over form here, especially when space is at a premium.

The good news about every microhood I've been a part of installing is they come with pretty darn good instructions and hanging hardware.

The tem

You know how you sometimes get that super annoying feeling that you are forgetting something? Well, it's been nagging on us for a while now. What have we forgotten? There's something that's been put on the back burner and forgotten about, and it's about to boil over.

For me, the sawdust is where it is AT.

Wood is my medium of choice.  I love how easy to cut wood is, how naturally beautiful it is.  I love how it smells when you work with it, I love how functional it becomes when you use it.  I love that wood is renewable, and while it renews, it renews our air.  I love working with wood.

But while taking on a Momplex, we've had to work with alot of other mediums.  Styrofoam blocks, poured concrete, and drywall. &

Well, we started working on the next set of kitchen cabinets for Momplex Unit A - and man, have things ever been slow going with a newborn! The Ram's pretty much been a one man show this kitchen ... poor guy, on the last kitchen we built, his building partner was 8 months preggers. One of the things we really wanted to do this time around was put together video tutorials for the bigger steps in building kitchen cabinets. I know many of you find helpful to see something done, and not just r