Wall Cabinets Reimagined

All of my furniture projects start with one of two things: a NEED or a FIND. In the case of this cute little cabinet, it started with a need. We were converting a room in the basement of our house from an entertainment space to a dance studio. It had a small kitchenette with cabinets that we were removing to make space for the dance floor. But we still wanted to have the storage the cabinets provided. The plan had been to re-hang the wall cabinets on the other side of the L-shaped room. But as in war, plans in home improvement rarely last beyond the first engagement. There were NO studs in the target wall, except those in the corners. Nothing to attach the small cabinets to. “I’ll just turn these into a standing cabinet,” I told my husband nonchalantly. After all, I had been doing a lot more furniture restoration in the last few years. This wasn’t THAT different, right? I had a general idea of where to go, but little-to-no experience in actually creating a piece of furniture.

Here was my general gameplan:

Stack the two cabinets and attach them using screws.
Attach a piece of wood to the top to disguise the ugly top, as these were cabinets intended to be hung up high enough that no one would ever see the tops.
Attach feet for my little cabinet to stand on.
Use trim pieces to hide the seams where the two cabinets meet.
Paint the whole thing a fun color. It’s a dance room, after all. It should be a fun piece.

Simple, right? Right . . . LOL

Challenge Number One - Stacking the Cabinets

As it turned out, the cabinet manufacturer wasn’t concerned with precision in making each cabinet exactly the same size. They would be hanging up high somewhere, after all. Who cares if one is a couple of millimeters wider than another? So when I stacked them it was clear that I wasn’t looking at having a smooth surface down each side. If the sides matched on one side, there was a tiny amount of overhang on the other. The small trim I had chosen was not going to lie flat if I put it on top of the other seam. Instead I put the trim pieces even with the bottom of the top cabinet. On the side where there were a few millimeters of overhang, the trim provided an optical illusion that it was the trim that was bumped out, rather than the cabinet. Once it was all painted the same color, the small size difference disappeared. Whew!

Challenge Number Two - the Doors

When I removed the cabinet doors so I could sand and paint them, I discovered that these were so cheaply made that instead of making the doors with holes on one side for right-side hinges and on the other for left-side hinges, they made holes for both types of hinges, and covered the unused holes with a plastic sticker! No way was I going to just paint over that. Off came the stickers, and in went another step in the process: Fill the holes with wood putty, which required 3 – 4 applications with sanding in between to get them completely level. I also decided that as long as I was working on them with wood filler anyway, I would fill in the two holes for the handles so I could drill new ones for the cute knobs I was envisioning to go on the piece that was taking shape in my mind. In for a penny, right? But at last all of that was done, and I could begin painting the doors. I had picked out a lovely tangerine color that tied in with colors I was using on other parts of the basement. I could hardly wait to see it for real, as opposed to on a paint chip. And since the doors would require multiple coats on both sides, with drying/curing time in between so they could be flipped, time was a-wastin’!

Challenge Number Three - the Top

I am not what you might call “spatially gifted.” In other words, I had an idea in my head for what this wood piece on top would look like, but I couldn’t tell you, for example, “I want there to be an inch of overhang on the front and 2 inches on the sides.” I COULD say, “I want the front to be pretty much even with the fronts of the doors when they’re in place. The sides need to overhang more than that, but I don’t know the number. I’ll have to see it.” I recruited my wonderful engineer husband to hold up the door and a piece of wood so that I could stand back and look at the big picture. He then took what I was telling him about where each edge should be and translated that into actual numbers. It became clear quickly that if I wanted to avoid the hideously pricey, nicer pieces of wood, in order to get the general sized top I wanted, I would have to use plywood. That was fine, I had found a lovely piece of trim I had decided I was going to use on the top piece anyway. It was exactly the right width to hide the ugly edges of the plywood. And especially since I was painting the top, it was all good. AND we already had plywood that could be cut to the needed size, so NO additional expense! Before you could say “table saw,” my husband had helped me cut the plywood to the needed size. Yes, I COULD have done it myself, but we like working together, and I trusted his ability to cut to the correct size more than I did my own. As I said, I’m not really spatially gifted.

Challenge Number Four - the Feet

The FEET! Oh, the FEET! I had found these darling little curved feet on Amazon, and they completed the picture in my head of what the final form of my cabinet should be. They were, in a word, PERFECT! They had bolts already attached to them, so I bought the mounting hardware appropriate for that type of foot. The instructions said to just drill holes for the bolts to recess into, use screws to attach these mounting plates, and presto! You have feet. First I had to attach more wood to the bottom to create the necessary thickness to keep the feet from poking into the interior of the cabinet. I used leftover pieces of plywood from my top, and then leftover bits of trim from the sides to hide THOSE ugly edges. But then I followed the hardware instructions, and with great anticipation screwed the perfect feet onto the cabinet and flipped it back over. Wah Wah. There was a gap between the top of the foot and the mounting plate. A very visible gap. It looked terrible. I wish I had taken a picture, but I was busy wallowing in the pit of What-In-The-World-Do-I-Do-Now. My husband and I spitballed a number of ideas for solutions. It’s always SO helpful to have someone else to to talk through the big challenges and help you figure out the best way out of the pit. I tried painting the tops of the feet, which I hadn’t done, because why waste paint on something no one would see? It didn’t make the gap any less obvious. I considered putting a wider piece of trim on the bottom so it would hang down and hide the gap. But I loved how it looked with the trim that matched the sides. We talked about flipping the mounting hardware over and making a hole in the cabinet base for it to sink into. It might not have worked though, and the appropriate drill attachment to make the hole was over $50. Then my husband came up with the simplest, most-obvious ( so it took us over an hour to think of it, lol ) idea. Remove the mounting hardware, drill new holes in the feet, and mount them directly with screws. The bolts wouldn’t be in the way. We had already drilled holes for them to be recessed into. A trip to our local hardware store informed us that drill bits in the proper size for the screws we wanted to use didn’t come in a length that would accommodate our needs. But since we were counter-sinking them, by drilling those holes first, we were able to get all the way through the feet and into the plywood. Thank goodness my perfect feet were only 2 inches high!! 🙂

So now the whole cabinet was together. I had my adventures with the miter saw and lack of spatial giftedness in cutting the trim pieces. There was a small amount of waste because there are no take backs when cutting wood. But I got through with a minimum of gray hairs added and no extra trips to buy more trim, so I called it a win for sure. But before I could paint, I had one more small challenge to overcome.

Challenge Number Five - Filling in the Holes

Since these cabinets had previously been mounted to a wall and to each other (side by side) there were screw holes that needed to be filled. And here is where I made a discovery a bit too late. MDF, which is what the sides were made of, MDF with thick paper laminate, does not take wood putty well. The moisture causes the MDF to swell, and little bits you had sanded down and/or tucked neatly into the hole poke right back out again, and they don’t sand back down well at all. Here is what I WOULD have done if I had realized that. I would have first used my utility knife to make sure I got as many of the stray bits removed as possible, as opposed to tucked out of the way. Then I would have primed FIRST with the same type of primer you use on bare drywall. We used it when repairing walls in the basement during the danceroom project, and it sealed the damaged drywall so that we could patch it. I suspect the same process would have helped here. But I didn’t do that. Instead I just filled and sanded and filled and sanded and filled and sanded . . . You get the idea. In the end I still had spots that were visible after painting, but I decided I could live with that. On to the fun part . . . Paint!

Painting the Cabinet

Actually, before I could paint the cabinet I had one more step if I wanted to avoid having the filled areas having a different texture and sheen than the rest of the piece. Have you ever fixed a hole in your wall, only to find that when you painted over the spackle, the repaired spot had a different sheen than the surrounding wall? When you looked at the wall, your eye went straight to the repair? It’s SO frustrating. The same thing can happen when you use wood filler to repair spots on a piece of painted furniture. And the solution is also the same . . . PRIMER. Even if you’re using a paint and primer in one, use a separate primer over repaired/filled spots. That way when you go over it with your final paint choice, the repaired spot won’t stand out from the surrounding areas. The paint I chose is Behr Alkyd paint in the color Exotic Blossom. The interior is Mango Tango – the lightest color on the same card as Exotic Blossom. For more on why alkyd paint is my preferred choice when painting furniture or cabinetry, check out Alkyd Paint: Magic or Misery? I’ll also address some of the foibles of applying this particular product, and techniques to overcome them. But once I had the body and all 4 doors painted and the paint cured, I reattached the doors (after a small adventure in figuring out where I put the baggie with the screws. Mental note: Decide where to put things like that and ALWAYS put them there! ). I attached the new pulls, and voile! The cabinet was done!

Summing It All Up

So there you have it. For about $60 I turned ordinary wall cabinets that we already had but couldn’t use into a cute, free-standing cabinet that we LOVE. By far the priciest part of the project was the feet ($25 on Amazon). I have no regrets, because they were just perfect. 🙂 For other Phoenix Furniture transformations, I’ve actually harvested really beautiful feet from thrift store finds that pretty much had no other redeeming qualities. (Ottomans, for some reason, tend to have really nice, reusable feet. They’re pretty much just padded boxes with feet, so I guess where else would a manufacturer add character?) The paint was the next most expensive part of the project, because alkyd paint is a tad pricier than some other options. Again, if you’d like to know why I feel it’s worth the extra $$, check out the link above. If I’d had to purchase wall cabinets, I priced them at ReStore for $10 – $15 each. It occurred to me while doing so that you could do this same thing with a single, taller wall unit, and have a piece with 2 doors, rather than 4. Those ran $15 – $25 at ReStore. The big benefit there would be not worrying about finding two that matched, which isn’t always an easy thing. If you wanted a taller cabinet, you could also just add more to the stack. Trim ( called “moulding” in the big box home improvement stores ) is relatively inexpensive. Depending on what you choose, an 8ft piece can run anywhere from $5 – $18. Mine was on the very cheap side of that range, which I could get away with because it was narrow, and I was painting it rather then staining. Stain grade trim is on the more expensive end of the range. Last, but not least, the pulls were a set of 4 from TJ Maxx. So as well as being super cute, they were the cheapest purchase towards the final transformation. To pull it all together, even if you have to buy wall cabinets at ReStore AND you fall in love with perfect-but-pricey feet, you could replicate this project in your own preferred colors for well under $100.