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

This set of stringers is going to get put in a skirt and heels - er, risers and treads today.

But before we start putting our Sunday's best on these stairs, let's take a second to remember where these stair boards have been.

We originally spent $400 on 2x12 boards,

Yep, at one point, they were new, not gray and old looking at all.

Until we poured concrete in them.  That's where the gray staining comes from.

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Seven sheets of PureBond plywood and $200 in popular boards.

Yep, that's what it took to take this blank space ....

And turn it into this:

Well, at least to build all those cabinets!

I'd love to know how to make a dishwasher out of plywood, but I'm going to stick to cabinets for now.

The Ram and I spent about a week building the cabinets, and honestly, the building was the easy part.  Once we got all th

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,

Whether you buy kitchen cabinets or you DIY them yourself (I'm totally on team DIY here!) I think the biggest difference maker in how professional looking your kitchen cabinet ends up appearing is in the tiny little details.  In other words, after you hang your cabinets, you aren't done quite yet.

After installing all the kitchen cabinets for the Momplex Vanilla Kitchen, there's a few little things that will make a big difference to take care of.

The most obvious one is finis