Surrounding the Fridge

By now you know that next week the kitchen wall is coming down — at long last! The contractor is slated to start on Monday and thinks it will take 4 – 5 days. Sam and I are alternating vacation days from work so that one of us will be home at all times in case decisions need to be made, and also more importantly to snap some pictures so I can keep you all updated. I’ll pop in on the blog with a status check mid-week (unless my house has collapsed), but I’ll also try to use instagram to share some more timely progress pics.

Between now and then we have a lot more prep to do, like removing the wall cabinets, breaking up the backsplash, clearing out the kitchen and sunroom, and taping up plastic over the doorways to prevent dust from filling our house. Also my dad is coming this weekend to work on the pantry we’re building together, so we’ll have plenty to keep us busy!

In the meantime, we tackled one more kitchen project this past weekend: building a surround for the fridge. As you probably recall, our plan is to build a wall of counters/cabinets where the buffet used to be.

One of the elements of this design is building in the fridge so it looks less like a fridge just plunked in the middle of the wall. We planned to repurpose the cabinet that was above our old fridge and then build sides to surround the fridge.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, I decided to follow Young House Love’s tutorial for building in a fridge. They do great work and always explain it so well that it’s easy to follow along.

Of course my dimensions were somewhat different so there were important modifications along the way.

I started by buying a 4’x8′ piece of plywood for the sides of the surround. I found a nice solid poplar piece:

Since I only needed the surround to be 24″ deep (which is the depth of the fridge minus the doors), I just had Home Depot cut the whole things to the exact right height (in my case, 85.5″) and then rip it right down the middle to create two identical 2′ wide pieces.

They did mess up one corner and offered to start fresh, but I knew I could put that corner in the back where it will be hidden so I negotiated a discount instead.

I also picked up two lengths of pine 1″x2″s which I also had them cut to 85.5″ each — the goal here was to attach them like trim to the front of the plywood to give it a beefier look. I can make cuts like this at home, but it’s always easier to have it done at the store and plus it helps ensure that the wood fits in the subaru.

Fortunately with the back and passenger seats down it all slid right in for a perfect fit. It’s just a good thing I was by myself.

I used my kreg jig to attach the 1x2s to the front edge of the plywood with pocket holes, just like YHL. It was a little unwieldy to do myself, but I figured out that I could prop one end up on a piece of wood with the other in the kreg jig clamp and it would stay really sturdy for me to drill holes.

I drilled six pairs of holes along the length of the plywood, and then attached the 1x2s at a right angle.

Before starting to build, I realized I needed to do one big prep step: figure out the plan for the kitchen floors. The place where the fridge surround will go crosses the threshold between tiled and tile-less:

That means that the height changes. Basically I needed to decide if we’re going to redo the floors or not, and if so whether we’re going to tile over the existing floors or rip them out and start from scratch. That would determine whether I should be ripping out any tiles now to build the surround at the lowest level, or build up a portion of the bottom of the surround with plywood and leave the tile areas intact.

After some back and forth, Sam and I agreed that we need to put new floors in (if you don’t know why, see this post) and we should rip out the old tiles and start from scratch rather than tiling over them. Our ceilings are low so we didn’t really want to make the floors thicker (even a tiny bit), and we would have had uneven thresholds where the floors met other rooms in the house and had to plane down the basement and back door. It is going to be a ton of work and I don’t know yet what tiles we’re going with, but there will be something new! Really I should be waiting on all this work until we put the floors in so I can just build right on top of the floors rather than having to tile around all this work I’m now doing, but I wanted to do this project so that’s just how it is.

I used my DeWalt multi tool and a screwdriver and hammer to break up the tiles that are where our cabinetry will be:

It gave me a good taste for how tough removing the whole floor will be….

With this done it was time to start constructing the surround, and Sam jumped in to help since it required two bodies. First up was some math. The cabinet is 33″ wide and our new fridge is 36″ wide, plus I wanted to add a little extra on each side for the fridge to slide in and out of the surround comfortable. That meant we needed to add about 3.5″ in width to the cabinet from it to fit across the top of the surround — 1.75″ on each side. I went rifling through my scrap wood pile, and ended up finding a 1.75″ board that was perfect. It’s actually something we’d found stored in the basement rafters when we were doing the electrical work a few weeks ago. I guess it was meant to be!

My plan was to build out supports on the two plywood side pieces to make it the right width to work with the cabinet, then mount the cabinet to the wall above the fridge, and then lastly attach the plywood to the side of the cabinet.

Building out the plywood was pretty easy. We started with one side lying face down on the kitchen floor.

Then I screwed in a piece of scrap wood that was .75″ thick, since that created a surface flush with the edge of the trim I’d added.

Next I screwed on the 1.75″ thick scrap wood, lining it up against the front edge of the surround.

The only reason I screwed these on separately is that I hadn’t thought to buy screws that were long enough to reach through all the layers. Yeesh. I just made sure to countersink the screws so that the additional layers could fit on totally flush.

I repeated this towards the back of the plywood as well, with the idea that we’d attach the surround at both the front and back of the cabinet on each side.

We repeated this with the other side of the surround, and then it was time to mount the cabinet. First we had to remove it from the opposite wall, which wasn’t too hard but did take some time because it was screwed into the wall and ceiling at a lot of different points.

Next we positioned it above the fridge, trying to center it and then using wood blocks to prop it up to the right height. We couldn’t attach the cabinet to the side panels and then lift it up as a single unit like YHL did because our ceilings are low and we wouldn’t have been able to get the cabinet up once it was all together without banging into the ceiling.

We did have to add some scrap wood to the back to bump out the cabinet a little — it’s 24″ deep, which is exactly the depth of the plywood but remember we’d added 1×2 trim to the front of the plywood which added .75″ of depth. We just screwed slats of .75″ thick scrap wood along the back of the cabinet and drilled into the wall through those.

Next we positioned each side of the surround and attached it to the cabinet by sending screws in from inside the cabinet. I was pretty relieved when we put the pieces in place and everything actually matched up to be the perfect width.

This all sounds so nice and easy, but it took us about 8 hours to do the project — there was a lot of trial and error, stripped screws, a slowly dying drill battery, etc. Plus drilling into a ceiling-height cabinet just isn’t easy — Sam did most of it because he’s taller than me, but it was still hard for him to get leverage inside the cabinet even standing on a chair.

But here’s how it’s looking now!

You can see the faint trace of one of the recessed light holes we covered up two weeks ago — the other is covered by the fridge cabinet now.

I’m pretty pleased with our handiwork! Eventually we need to use wood filler and do lots of sanding to get a totally seamless transition between all the pieces of scrapwood so that when we paint it will look like one solid piece — but that’s for another day. In the meantime, the fridge looks a little bit less like it’s just floating there! And in case you’re concerned, there’s still enough room between the top of the fridge and bottom of the cabinet that when we tile the floor under the fridge it won’t be a problem. We’ll also install crown molding along the top of the cabinets once we finish building them all, so the small gap between cabinet and ceiling will be hidden. But for now, this feels like decent progress!

Sharing at Create It Thursday, Home Matters, Two Uses Tuesday, The Creative Gallery, and Idea Box.