Momplex

There's been quite a few awkward moments of me peeking inside kitchen cabinets to get to this point. And I'm not interested in what type of peanut butter my friends like, or how they store their canned goods.  I've been on a quest to find a way to build strong, high quality kitchen cabinets for less than flat pack - that mind you, you still have to "build" anyways - with simple tools and standard off the shelf materials and basic techniques.  Techniques that I can do, that most anyone

Fridge cabinets can make a kitchen look custom and finished.  They are also great options for ending cabinetry and creating a balanced kitchen cabinetry layout.  

The good news is you can build your own fridge cabinet without spending a ton of time or money.  We do it all the time. 

Here's one of the cabinets we've made:

Let's demystify this -

It's two pieces of cabinet-grade plywood, held together on the b

One of my favorite projects on the Momplex interior has been this basement floor we coated:

For this floor, we used RustOleum's EpoxyShield Garage Floor Coating.  It's a paint, and you throw the speckles down to add variation.  We are extremely pleased with the durability of the floor - not a scratch in it after about six months of use!

We like floor paint/coatings for basements for a number of reasons:

- It seals your c

Well, here's a first. I'm going to show you how a carpenter makes a skirt. And yes, it's a pretty skirt.

Inside this closet, it's just 4 feet wide and 2 feet deep.  Nothing fancy.

I decided the most practical use of materials and space would be to add shelving 16" deep.  I don't like too deep shelving, but you really need the 16" to store large boxes (up here in Alaska, bulk shopping is a must, so lots of big boxes will get stored inside this pantry).

This would leave a little bit of space to the front for a vac

My friend Kate made me a believer.

When it came time to install a countertop for the Momplex Vanilla kitchen, we did go have a solid surface countertop priced out.  

The cost of the solid surface countertop was MORE than the entire kitchen!!!  And it would take 8 weeks and we'd have to pay for a full travel day each time someone drove to the site to measure, fit and install the countertop (yes, we are to blame there for living in the sticks in Alaska).

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It has been torture waiting for plywood day! We put the upstairs floor joists up, and I thought the very next day I'd be getting a sun tan on a roof top deck. Not so much the case ... we built stairs, backfilled, insulated ... just to name a few projects that had to get done as I tried not to glance up at those open floor joists ... and finally it's plywood day. (I'll be blogging about all the other projects we've been up to as well in the next coming bit). Hooray for plywood day!

After a couple of weeks of building kitchen cabinets and finishing them, I can't tell you how excited and eager I was for this day to come ...  Kitchen cabinet installation day!!!

Yep, this blank space is going to be a kitchen after today!

We are going to do the wall cabinets first.

First, we mark the height of the bottom of the wall cabinets.  Standard height is 54".

But we can't just mark 54" and pull a string line,

Hi everyone!  Happy Friday!

Do you remember back when we built this railing for Momplex Unit B?

We absolutely LOVE how it turned out.  And we love that not only does it protect the stair opening, but it's so substantial, it's almost like a long console table that you can lean on.

So when it came time for me to design a railing for Momplex Unit B, I wanted to keep the same substantialness, but add a modern twist to match the rest of Mompl