Searching for ways to update your kitchen? How to update your kitchen creating a built in cabinet.
I look at blogs, and watch HGTV just like everyone else. Inspiration strikes me at the strangest times. Sometimes I see something I like on a QVC set. While watching a Hallmark Movie, I pay attention to the backgrounds, homes, and how the set is decorated. I really am a strange bird... Hubby has good ideas too. Our kitchen is an 80's nightmare. We have carpet, yes, it is still there. A friend said, really it's still here? Well, yes, I am not paying for it to be replaced twice... we are working on our kitchen in increments... and I am pretty frugal after all. 
If you would like to read more about our home projects you can click to read:
We have a plan, and the plan is to figure it out one step at a time. LOL. Planning... we have done a lot of this.
Storage is desperately needed in our kitchen, we're still figuring it out. We had this lovely plate rack, original to the kitchen, but the rest of the kitchen had been ripped out. I had lined the shelves with my famous wallpaper I have used for several projects around here, vintage looking, my favorite!
I am a big fan of keeping original details in a home, but it made more sense for us to remove the plate rack and install built in storage. The rest of the kitchen had been torn out and a peninsula was installed which breaks up the kitchen. The stove is on one side and the fridge on the other side of the peninsula. It is "very" convenient (cue eye roll here). We removed the plate rack, built a cabinet, and recessed it in the wall. There was a small nearly unusable pantry behind this wall. It was very deep and about 12 inches wide. Who can fit in a 12 inch space? You could only use the very first part of the cabinet built into the wall.
This is what was left behind when we removed the plate rack.
As you can see, long shelves ran behind the plate rack from the hall. The space was so narrow, you could not access the shelves any further than about 12 inches into the pantry.
The shelves did not go the full length of the pantry and I had a hard lesson to learn when I put glassware towards the end of the shelf thinking it was safe and would not fall off. A large stack of antique dishes fell off the end and were all broken which burned my britches.
As you can see, they used quarter round as brackets for the shelves to sit on. It worked for all of these years so we did reuse it when we installed a very small pantry from the hall access door. I will post more on that small pantry another day.
Here is another angle of the removed plate rack.
And this is what we came up with. This cabinet is 20 inches deep and has lots of room for most of my dishes. it took some finagling to get the cabinet into the wall, but Mr. Vintage took a rubber mallet and hit it until it was completely encased into our wall.
Please ignore the mess inside the cabinet. It became a catch all while we were still working on it. We worked on this cabinet on weekends as we had time so it was a drawn out process. Mr. Vintage wanted to get the doors hung before I started painting them. The decorative screen went in after everything was in place and unfortunately, I do not have pictures of us putting this in place.
Here is what it looks like as the final project.
We purchased the cabinet door from Raw Doors. It is a very simple process, you just create the sort of doors you would like to have with the measurements you need. You can even see what they will look like when they are completed. They ship them to you and voila you have doors. We went back and forth with a solid door versus an open door. I knew I did not want glass (it needs to stay neat at all times-HA!) so we wanted to keep with the cottage/vintage look and decided to purchase a clover leaf sheet metal (purchased from Amazon, since covid, the price has gone up quite a bit) to line the doors with. I love the way it turned out! What do you think?
These sorts of projects keep me going... I love having a vision and seeing it come to fruition! I found the scroll piedmont above the cabinet at a place called Hope Timber. They are a garden center which also expanded to include barns that are full of goodies. They have two barn hops every year. Of course, this year it was canceled in the spring and the fall one I was unable to attend which made me so sad. I always scour the barns for all sorts of finds and never know what I will drag home! When I am there, I get so inspired with all sorts of projects. I always see things "differently" wondering around and dreaming up the next project to work on. I will share other finds from there soon.
What projects have you recently worked on? Where do you go to get inspired?
In case you were interested to know what all I can fit in this cabinet, here it is packed full... and for those of you who like to look in cabinets too. I had a friend who actually does this!
