Travels With Miranda

I’m just about done with the ‘dining room side’ of the dishwasher cabinet! The missing trim is cut, but I need some square brackets to assemble the remaining projects, so I’ll definitely need to get myself to Home Depot tomorrow.

Behold the doors that ate up almost three hours today!

Recognize the trim on them? I think this project explains for itself why I love scrounging for parts. I wouldn’t have been able to justify buying expensive trim like that just to ‘gussy up’ my doors. I am incredibly proud of them. I’ll make a door in a similar style for the other side.

Still missing on this side is a false front for the drawer that will mimic the trim work on the doors and hide the rough edges on that side of the unit.

The bottom panel has to remain accessible so I will be getting some magnets to hold it in place. There will be trim around it, but it will only be glued to the panel and not nailed into the cabinet.

I also need to decide how I’m going to fasten the doors. I bought some options yesterday, but I don’t think any of them will work, so I’ll need to see if I have any other choices. I don’t think magnets will be enough.

The door over the drawer doesn’t ‘match’ but this doesn’t bother me. Once everything is painted the same colour, it will all blend in together and the variety of textures will be welcome. Yes, that door overlaps the drawer. I couldn’t figure out a way to secure the drawer and the door just happened to be the right width while being too long so I thought that a well-secured door would also hold the drawer in place.

Today was a good renovation day and buoyed by my success I look forward to tackling the more difficult kitchen side tomorrow!

My fit of pique must have effected a cosmic change because the rain held off!!! It’s about to come down though.

I went to Home Depot this afternoon to get the angle brackets as well as door hinges and fasteners. I’m pretty sure I’ll return 90% of what I bought, but I didn’t want to have to go out tomorrow. Today’s visit took well over an hour because a Home Depot clerk and I started to talk about custom RV design and got into a hot debate about slides vs. no slides.

I got a pleasant surprise in regards to the angle brackets. I’ve always bought them in packs of 2 for about a dollar. I needed at least 40 to finish the dishwasher cabinet, duct tunnel, and bookcase installation, so I figured that I’d have to shell out at least $20 plus tax for all my brackets. But the Home Depot guy made some ‘contractor’ supplies materialise for me and I got a pack of 100 brackets for $6.95 plus tax!

It was three when I got back home and the hardest part of the job started. I find that no matter how many times I measure, I never get things 100% right. I had to go back and forth to the workshop to trim a panel or another. At least, my problems were too much height, which is much easier to remedy than not enough of it! I finally got everything level, although the dinette top isn’t as flush with the kitchen counter as it was when it was temporarily installed. It’s a matter of millimetres and probably not something the casual observer would notice so I decided to pick my battles.

The installation was a real puzzle as I had to figure out what to screw down first without blocking my access to something else I had to screw down. The sliders for the drawer were a nightmare to put in place and I wound up having to install the shelf above it with the angle brackets on the top side.

Once everything was assembled and secured, I added the counter and screwed that in nice and tight. The whole thing feels satisfactorily sturdy and secure for transport. It might not be very pretty, but it’s exactly what I wanted and once the doors and trim are on most of my lack of carpentry skills will be hidden behind stuff.

I discovered what a moot point looks like when I went to install the dishwasher as I had planned. It won’t fit that way; the hoses are too short! I’m going to have to orientate it the way that it was when it was under the counter. That somewhat changes my plans for the securing of it and may be the biggest cause of delays tomorrow. The other thing I still need to figure out is how to make the kitchen side of the cabinet look neat since it projects out beyond the width of the counter. You can see what I mean in the first picture. A solution will come when I start to work on the problem; it always works out that way.

I’ve decided to make my own doors after all since they will be quite small and I already have the materials for them. Tomorrow’s projects will be to finish the dishwasher cabinet then start on building the ductwork tunnel, and securing the bookcase. I believe this is a realistic target for tomorrow. Monday I will go back to Home Depot to return whatever I hardware I wound up not using and to pick up the lumber for the secret ladder project. There’s lots to do, but I am 100% on target so far and feeling pretty accomplished!

There’s a pizza with my name on it in the oven (not made by my hand, of course!) and I need to put in several hours at my contract tonight, so I’m calling it a day.

There are not enough expletives in all the languages of the world to describe how I feel about the change in the weather forecast for the next four days. It was supposed to be sunny with occasional cloud cover. Instead, it was overcast this morning and it is now going to rain for the next three days. And if that wasn’t enough, after four days of glorious sun and heat, it’s cooled down considerably. I’ll have to bring a heater into the workshop if I want to spend any time there.

First priority this morning, then, was to get the final cuts done for the dishwasher cabinet. I used a combination of the wardrobe and free plywood.

I was originally going to assemble the unit outside, but it will be much too cumbersome to carry. Now that it’s going to rain, I also don’t want to get it wet. Finally, an in situ installation will enable me to catch little mistakes much more easily. It’s going to be awkward to do the work in the rig, but it’s the best option.

I seriously under estimated how many angle brackets I’m going to need and I don’t have the patience to take apart my valances to get the handful I have left in the rig, so soon as I have lunch I’ll head over to Home Depot to buy a bucketload of brackets. I’m also going to size up plywood seeing as I have decided to let them cut my door panels for me since I won’t be able to use the tablesaw this weekend. I also wouldn’t be able to bring home a sheet without going through some tarping exercises to keep the rain off it.

(Seriously, I have no idea how anyone could live in this climate full-time. Between my six months in Campbell River and my four months in the GVR I have had a lifetime’s fill of damp, grey winters and am starting to miss a crisp, dry, sunny, twenty below, RV not built for that weather notwithstanding.)

Griping aside, here is what the dishwasher cabinet looks like right now. Some assembly, and trim, required:

I am really nervous about the whole assembly thing because it’s going to block off a corner of the window. I will have to take the whole cabinet apart, including the housing for the dishwasher, should I ever have to deal with a leak there, so I need to get into the habit of checking that area for condensation on a regular basis. I might be worried for nothing, but time will tell.

Off to Home Depot I go…

I had to stop early this afternoon because it got very cold very quickly in the workshop, but the progress for today makes me optimistic that I can make the dishwasher cabinet look nice.

I had planned on putting a bit of a ‘lip’ on the bottom of the cabinet to further discourage things from sliding out, so the trim is both pretty and functional.

The dining room side is going to be a bit trickier in that I need to keep the bottom panel open for access, but I think I’ll do something similar, only with magnets instead of nails.

Now, what would I do for eight solid hours of weather I could actually work in….

It was too wet, yet again, to work outside today, but, at least, it was warm enough to do so in the workshop. Mr. Neelix wasn’t going to let me get any work done unless I got him cat food RIGHT AWAY (even though his bowl was still full) so off I went to check out the spoils at Windsor Plywood and Home Depot. Unfortunately, I came home empty-handed. So, I decided to use what I had on hand, even if it was planned for another project.

Since I couldn’t work outside, using the table saw to cut my panels was out of the question. It’s just too tight inside the workshop to do so. I have three scars on my wrists to remind me of what power tools can do to you when you are working in ideal circumstances and warn against trying to ‘make do’. I therefore pulled out my trusty friend:

We have done A LOT of work together! Sure, cuts with a jigsaw aren’t as razor straight as you can get with a table saw, but I wasn’t risking any limbs, so it was worth it.

Two more panels cut, I did a mockup on the base to make sure the dimensions were okay:

Which brings me to an epiphany I had in the middle of the night. It’s no wonder I’m exhausted all the time, my brain never shuts off! The thought was related to the space behind the drawer:

I was just going to write it off as wasted space, but realised in the middle of the night that I could make that space accessible from the side of the kitchen and use it for storing oversized cutting boards and the like. Nice solution, but I’m not sure it was worth waking up for at 4 in the morning!

And this is where I paused for lunch:

I’m out of angle brackets, so I need to take apart some valances. That done, I will install the final two panels; a shelf that will go over the drawer and the one that will be against the wall.

Before I bring the unit into the rig and install it, I will need to pretty up the base with some trim.

Once the unit is installed, leveled, and pretty, I’ll work on doors.

It sure feels good to have something done today!