Home, Home on the Range (4100 kitchen drama)

Nooooooooo……..!!!

We started the kitchen cabinet cleaning over the weekend and discovered several problems:

PROBLEM #1: DRAWER GUIDES

Several drawers are missing guides, or the guide ROLLERS are missing… Ugh.  Look at how OLD these things are!

This “bottom-mount” style is no longer available and there’s no sides to mount today’s “side-mount” style…

It’s going to be hairy to get these out and replace them! Hmmmm…. we’ll figure that out later.

PROBLEM #2:  RANGE OPENING

We had planned to convert the range opening from a slide-in / drop-in style to a freestanding style.  Mostly because it makes for easier access for maintenance AND about 1/2 the cost to replace.

Seemed simple enough- just take the range out, cut away the tile floor trim, bust out the solid piece on the bottom and cut the tile countertop back to the wall.

So we pulled the stove and tossed it.

Turns out, the range opening is only 29.5″ wide.  Specifically 29.675 inches wide at the widest point between the two cabinets.   Modern day stoves (of any type) require a 30″ opening (or 29.875″ to be exact).  UGH.  Seriously?   We are 1/4 inch too narrow?  I’m not talking about the opening- where most people shave off the sides… I mean the cabinet SIDE to the cabinet SIDE.

I measured the set of drawers on the right-hand side of the stove and they measure 25.5″.  Modern day cabinets are a standard width of 24″…. so voila!  Replacing that cabinet base with a modern cabinet base would give us a whole 1.5″!

The catch?  Can we remove the old cabinet base without breaking the tile backsplash or tile floors.   And will the new one have the same footprint?  And will having  a modern cabinet look weird with the rest of the kitchen?

Here’s what I found for $144 at Home Depot:

It’s the ONLY option they sell in their prefabricated department.  It’s not bad looking, but it’s not perfect either. And it got horrible reviews online for being poor quality.  Plus I’d have to sand it and paint it and the whole nine yards.

I went to the ReStore (Habitat for Humanity) to see if they had any solutions, but sadly they didn’t.  So I went to Parr Lumber’s Cabinet Outlet to see what they had….nothing in stock that would work (at that location), but she showed me what the drawer fronts would look like and I think it’s better looking than what Home Depot offered, and it’s better quality!  Definitely more modern styling, but I think it will be OK.  In this case it is 100% finished in white so no work for me!

This is how the drawers would look:

More on that later…  I’m still shopping around.

Back to the range opening…. Tuesday night we began the kitchen demolition… it took about 1.5 hours, but Jim got the cabinet out, the tile removed behind the range opening, the edge of the existing cabinet cut back, and the floor and backsplash are completely intact!  We’re ready to install a new cabinet- this time making sure to leave a 30″ opening (maybe 30.5 or 31 to be extra sure)!

And back to Problem #1- now that we’ve demolished the drawer cabinet- we have 8 spare guides with rollers!  Yippee!  Free fixes!

Stay tuned!