Blog de Puree

With the foresight of a reknowned fortune-teller, Randye told the contractors to save the kitchen cabinets when they were pulling them out while gutting our old kitchen this past summer.

“There has to be some use we can find for them, rather than filling up some landfill,” she told me after I rolled my eyes and asked her if she was serious. Then she started rattling off a couple of uses we could find for them around the house–most of them involving me, tools and the better part of a weekend.

And this past week, an opportunity presented itself.

Recently our clothes dryer in the basement died and the spotlight focused in on our old stand-up washer/dryer unit that was languishing in the mud room on the first floor–the mud room which was originally billed as a 4th bedroom during the sale of our house. (It might serve as comfortable living quarters for a Navy submariner, but not a typical civilian.)

The standup washer/dryer was new about 4 years ago when it was purchased for our place in Boston. When we moved into this house, there was already a working washer and dryer in the basement, and this one didn’t fit in the low basement, so we decided to save it for a rainy day. So when the dryer in the basement died, we decided that rather than spend the money to fix an old, decrepit dryer or replace it with a new one, we’d pay to have the standup unit installed in our mud room and eliminate the need to drag laundry down to the basement.

Once the standup unit was installed, Randye’s master vision was given to me in the form of a blueprint for the room and it was time to repurpose the old kitchen cabinets. (See the old cabinets from an old post in August of 2006.) I sawed the kitchen cabinet that hung over the old island in half so that it would fit on a wall and gave it a new back. I also took two old above-the-counter cabinets, fastened them to one single backboard and added shelves in between.

Luckily, Randye’s folks came to visit for the holidays and her Dad was an extremely welcome help–an added back, a more logical thinker when it came to measurements and how to approach the cabinet installation, as well as a steady hand to hold the wood during the sawing process.

We’ve also added a stand-up drawer unit with a butcher block that was next to the old stove, as well as a wired shelf, also with a butcher block on it. We now have a fully functional laundry/coat/mud room, with cabinets, wall shelves, tables, folding surfaces and plenty of storage. The last step–to come later– will involve building a low bench, with shelves for footwear underneath, along the other wall.

Another project for another weekend …

Added 7 Jan 2007:
We sent our Ikea hack to the Ikea hacker blog. They liked it and we made one of the first posts of 2007. Thanks, Jules!