You may recall that I pulled down some cabinets in our home office and knocked a hole in the wall in the process. The cabinets were originally housed in a conference room at work, but I salvaged them when our lease was up and we moved to a new office. The original installation was a lot like this but without the glass and fewer upper cabinets between the end cabinets.
I got all of the upper cabinets, including the two end ones.
My wife decided that she wants to keep the upper cabinets and ditch the two lower extensions. I thought this would be easy. As usual, I was wrong. What I discovered is that the end cabinets were incorporated into the upper cabinets as one large unit instead of a lower unit and upper unit. I had to break out the skill saw and cut them apart. Now that they’re apart, I have to patch the gaps and get them smoothed out in preparation for paint.
I didn’t do a good job of taking pictures of the process, so here’s what’s going on. You’re looking at the bottom of the cabinet. They were stained cherry and shellacked. The lighter area used to have the lower cabinet attached. The notch is where the back of the lower cabinet used to be. They used different joints between the side and back. The back plywood was notched so it could support the bottom of the top cabinets. The bottom cabinet looked like a separate box with the top being where the unstained portion is in the photo. I’ll never know why they didn’t just treat it as a separate box.
Anyway, I had to flatten the area where I cut the bottom cabinet free. The back wasn’t nailed to the upper cabinet shelf, so I ran a couple of screws into it until I can get the patch in place. The patch will be glued and nailed so that it all holds together properly when it’s done. The patch itself is scrap plywood which I’ll cut down to size tomorrow once the glue is dried.
The other cabinet was a little further along when I quit for the day.
I started shaving this patch down with a hand plane before I realized that it would be a lot easier after the patch piece was in glued in place. So, I glued and screwed it in place and will deal with the rest of the surface prep tomorrow.
There’s something immensely satisfying about those curls of wood coming up from a hand plane.