Those goddamn cabinet doors
So, some backstory… We host Christmas Eve every year at our place for family. This has been going on at our house (which was previously my wife’s aunt’s house) for as long as anyone can remember. Once she passed away and we moved up here to live in the house, we kept the tradition going. It’s stressful, annoying for a month while we get setup, but ultimately is generally looked forward to by everyone in the family. This year was a bit light on attendance (we usually have like 50 people or so), since we have a wedding for one of the cousins on NYE and other family members weren’t coming home ON Christmas with family, but instead were waiting to come home this weekend for the wedding/NYE instead. Fine, cool. We stressed, planned, prepared, cleaned, stashed… and everything went fine. It’s all done. It’s over now.
Last year in September (or maybe early October?), we had some water leakage in our kitchen sink and had to tear some of the existing linoleum off of the floor due to damage (more on that here in another post, soon). That turned into us paying to have the original wood floor refinished and do a mini-remodel on the kitchen in the process. We decided to move the stove and fridge, which meant moving some cabinets around and doing demo on a weird pony wall that was in the middle of the room. I frantically built a big ass cabinet surround for the new fridge so that we could have a functional kitchen again for Christmas Eve last year. I got that mostly done (minus the actual doors for the cabinets) including a new tile backsplash and space for a new hood over the stove. The rest would be finished in 2018, we planned.
Since my workshop is in a detached garage that’s unheated, and we live in the frozen tundra for most of the winter season - working out there is a giant pain. I don’t really want to almost suffocate on the propane heater, but I also like to be able to feel my finger and toes. Working on precision routing of cabinet doors generally requires a bit of dexterity, which the cold does not provide. We also had a playhouse for the kids that I had been working on that took priority once it started getting warmer. I worked on that on and off as time permitted throughout the summer and early fall.
Needless to say, life got in the way and we didn’t think about the kitchen for awhile, but my wife mentioned that she really wanted to have cabinet doors before Christmas Eve. Sure, no problem at all, right? Well, work and life again got in the way and here we are in winter again with that same issue that we faced before. BUT, I had a solution. I could work on cleaning out part of the basement and make it a shop! It already has access to a cellar door to the outside with its own stairs and stuff. It would be easy to clean it out and get it in shape pretty quickly. SURE it would.
Now, the house that we live in is old. Like, the main part was built in 1847 and it’s been added onto since then. Fine, cool. Just be aware that everything is plaster and lathe, but the basement has a concrete floor and isn’t really that dated. Things have been updated along the way (we had the house completely rewired before we moved in like 7 years ago) so it’s not so bad. The part of the basement that I was going to clean up had an old washer and dryer, a chest freezer and a shower (seriously, I have no idea why… this is an unfinished basement. Gross) that needed to be moved out, and just general cleanup needed to happen.
I figured that I would buy an appliance dolly, because who doesn’t need a fucking appliance dolly, right? Off to Harbor Freight to pick up one of those bad boys for like $100, plus 10 other things that I might need at some point? Add about 17 trips to Lowe’s for wood and various other items that of course I’ll need at some point. (Seriously, why is it impossible to ever get ALL of the parts that you need in one trip?) I had some days off from work, so I decided to use them to take off the week before Christmas to get everything done, because SURE… that would be enough time, right?
So, my PTO week rolls around, and I get to work (technically, it was the Saturday before my official PTO week started, but who is counting…) Well, first, I had to check my email and build up the motivation to get dressed and then go out to the freezing garage and grab the cold dolly. After screwing around for a few hours, I finally did it! I got up and started. That’s a win in my book. I moved a wood pile out first, and then I muscled the freezer out without the dolly. Those weren’t hard, just annoying. Then comes the washer. That sucker was heavy. Strapped it to the dolly, and up the stairs I went. Well, kind of. It got stuck about halfway up because I’m a dumb ass and didn’t realize that I needed to spin it around so that the raised part with the controls on it wouldn’t hit the cellar door on the way up.
ANYWAY, once I figured out my boneheaded mistake, I spun it around and hulked that bastard out and took it to the garage. Same thing with the dryer, which the drum on it must have weighed about 1,340,988 lbs. I’m sure that I popped a few blood vessels in my forehead, tore something in my back and pooped a little on the way up. BUT, I got it up and out of there. Took it to the garage, unstrapped it, pushed it into place and gave it the finger. Glad that I’ll still have to move them again in the spring to get my mower out, but I can’t recycle them for free until then, so I guess that I have to deal with it. It’s fine for now, because as you remember from before… the garage is cold, and it sucks in the winter. I don’t want to go out there anymore.
So, back inside to survey the situation…… Cool. Now all I had to do was clean up the floor, move old wood pieces from shelves that I had broken down, sweep, sweep more and then I could start building a bench and a table. Oh, and more sweeping. I think that I had two shop-vacs down there at one point. Awesome. I was making progress. Well, that progress took me four days and sucked balls the whole time (not with a shop-vac. ouch), as it involved dust and other airborne particles that had been undisturbed in 50 years. So glad that I was breathing that in all day. But, I got it mostly in a workable state.
So, what does that mean? Yeah, another 2054 trips to Lowe’s, because I obviously needed a bunch of new crap for some reason. I did, however, need wood to build a work table, so that wasn’t ALL unnecessary. I got some spray foam goo to fill up the huge gaps in the door frame and made sure that I sprayed it in any hole in a 15-foot radius of the door while I was using up the can. I also decided that I didn’t want to eat anymore spider webs, so I needed to vac out the stairwell to outside, which made everything look 1000% better. I even got some new LED shop lights to put up and (temporarily) used one of them to light up the door entrance while I was moving things in from the garage. That helped me not fall and break myself more in the dark stairwell. I did manage to fall UP the stairs at one point, taking a few layers of skin from my right shin with it, but that was the extent of the damage. I didn’t even slam my skull into the low door frame, which I assumed that I would do at least 10 times in the first hour that I was moving things. So, I guess that’s a win?
In order to make a shop work, you kind of need tools, a bench and some kind of work table. Right now, this “shop” had none of that. Just a pile of old paint cans and some new shop lights. At least I could actually see the floor in places now.
But alas, it was time to start moving in some serious tools from the garage, my friends! Basically, it was just a fun game of “throw everything that I think I’ll need” into one of my tool bags and go get other missing things as needed. Which meant that I would need to take another 228243 trips back and forth to get little things after I moved the table saw, miter saw, and various drills and hand tools that I would definitely need. I couldn’t have just figured that I’d need to more almost all of the things that I had in the existing garage shop to the new basement shop, right? That would make too much sense. Goddammit, I’m sure that I have brain damage from past youthful exploits.
Fortunately, on one of my trips back out to the garage, I noticed that I had an existing workbench that I had already built. It was situated in front of one of the bays for the cars and didn’t have much stacked on it. Easy enough. I figured that I could bring it in and cut it down and use for now. After wrestling it down the stairs and putting in the general area that I wanted it, it just so happened to slide right into place in the spot that I had cleaned out for it. Plopped the toolbox that I grabbed out of the garage on top, and now I was almost in business.
Somewhere along the line (Re: weeks before doing this), I was talking to a co-worker about shitty dust masks, like the cheap white 3M ones that you get in a 3-pack and how we both hated them. Well, that got me to googling things again (never a good idea, right?) and I ran across the RZ mask site that I had bookmarked awhile back in hopes that I would drunkenly purchase one or something. Well, this time, I was neither drunk, not impaired in any way, and I grabbed two different kinds to try out. One was a neoprene M1 mask with some hideous yellow design on it, and the other was a nylon M2 mask with some hideous white/black design on it. At least it’ll save my sinuses and lungs somewhat, right? Well, at this point, they had showed up and were unpackaged and ready to use.
So, I decided to knock out a beam that was supporting the floor above, so I could have more room for my work table. (That wasn’t an issue, as it wasn’t really structural, and was supported about two feet next to the beam that I knocked down by a MUCH larger chunk of wood). With that out of the way, I proceeded to start cutting down the 4x4 posts that I was using for the main legs down to size, and then hand sawing some lap joints into the top for 2x4 cross braces to sit on. I have no idea why I decided that THIS was the time to learn how to do lap joints, other that it’s something that I have seen a lot of other people do on their work tables and benches to make super strong things with basic construction grade wood. And it worked mostly fine. I did cheat after the first one that I cut with nothing but a hand saw and used a DeWalt 18v circular saw to rough the cuts in and a DeWalt 18v reciprocating saw to tear the little bitch pieces out. It worked and looked fine. Cut down some 2x4s on the miter saw and covered every surface in the room in sawdust. Slapped it all together and framed it in around one of the main lally columns, because it was better to have a big ass post in the middle of the table than to lose one of the approaches to the table edge. This is because the room that I’m making into a shop has these really cool (stupid?) brick foundation platform things that the house sits on that takes up a ton of space (more on those in another post).
So, you can probably see where this is going, if you’ve made it this far. I’ve already burned through half of my PTO week on building out the actual shop, and zero time on building actual cabinet doors. Yep, I tend to always prioritize the wrong things and can’t seem to focus on the actual task at hand. But, I had all of the supplies that I’d need to build them, so I had that going for me. I went upstairs and measured all of the openings of the cabinet areas, wrote them down in a little notebook instead of putting them in my phone (Mostly so I wouldn’t look at it in two days and say, WTF were these for? What was I thinking? And then have to do it all over again.). I ever drew little illustrations of the relative sizes of the doors that I needed to make in an attempt to do everything correctly.
I went over and over the initial measurements, figuring out what the final size needed to be, taking into account the 3/8” ridge that I needed to make on all of them with a router, cabinet hardware, etc. I had it. I was ready to go. I had told my wife that I could knock them out in no time once I was setup. I drew out all of the measurements on my wood, ripped the wood down to the proper sizes, routed out the edge groove on each one, and then rounded the corners over to match our other cabinet doors. Then I went to grab the hardware that I purchased last year to test fit and pre-drill the tiny screw holes, to make things a little easier on install. Only one problem with that… I couldn’t find the cabinet hardware anywhere.
So, I scoured the basement. I looked through every possible shelf, box and pile that they could have been stashed away in. I searched in my office, in the laundry room, in the mud room. Anywhere that I have once kept a box of hardware ever in this place, or would have moved something while cleaning up. I tore apart every obvious place in the garage, but still came up empty. At this point, it was Dec 23rd, which is way too close for comfort to finish these things in time. But I had resolve. I was ready and could knock them out which finishing up the final touches on the house and getting things together for our gathering. I even made a late-night trip to Walmart to get all possible remaining cooking items that we’d need for the morning, so I wouldn’t have to do it on the 24th.
I managed to get up at like 8:30 on the 24th (I have a real problem with sleep management, and getting out of bed is one of the things that I just don’t want to do, ever.) and hop in the car to head to Lowes. I went in, got replacement hardware to cover the ones that I couldn’t find and hurried back. Then I got to work. Measured and drilled out everything, sanded real quick, then swept up. I quickly put down two coats of white on the door fronts, did some other things while those dried, and put two more coats on later. Still good on time, I went ahead and put on the door hardware. All was good, or so I thought.
I took some basic tools upstairs (screwdriver, impact, shims and screws) and opened up my little step-ladder. I test-fit the top right small door. That’s odd, it looks like it’s a little small. Put that one to the side and brought up two more. Test fit both of those. SAME GODDAMN PROBLEM. On the third one, I was determined to make it work. I aligned it carefully, making sure that there wasn’t any space on any side and everything was straight, then screwed in the hardware. Stepping back to check it out… yep. All of the doors that I made were about an inch too small. ARRRRRGH. Somewhere along the line, I must have missed something, or got a calculation wrong. I ever checked everything compared to a previous test door that I had made and fit perfectly. I’m not sure what happened, but holy shit, these things were not right. Defeated, I put all of my doors back in the basement and put my tools away. I went up to my room and go changed, because at this point, it was too late to take a shower. I kicked over something in the hallway on accident and hurt my foot on the way up. Goddammit, I failed at making these doors happen for a whole year. I really felt bad.
Still, I think that this is one of those things that only myself and my wife would notice. People have been over to our house many times throughout the year and never have never seen doors on the thing the whole time, who gives a shit if we got them done for Christmas eve? I guess no one, other than me. This was a big deal, and I couldn’t make it happen. I’ve historically been awesome at horrible procrastination and pulling things out of my ass at the last minute. This got me through high school and all of college, right? I do it at work on a regular basis and I’ve always been able to pull it off. Not this time. Shit.
Which brings me to this goddamn new year’s epiphany: The wife has been prodding me to finally go and talk to someone about my issues, and a potential ADHD diagnosis. I’m in my early 40s now, but am fairly sure that I’ve been struggling with the same issues since I was about grade school age. I’ve been through the gamut of emotional escapes throughout the years (I could write a novel on my high school years and experiences) and have tried to deal with things myself. At some point, I got myself an actual primary care physician (you know, a normal doctor that you go to), like an actual adult does. I still can’t manage to make/keep appointments for some reason. I’ve mentioned my issues, run through the list of fun anti-depressants and their side effects (because I LOVE being so tired that I could take a nap at any time, even after sleeping for 12 straight hours at night) and finally tossed all of those, as they weren’t doing any good.
But the ADHD seed was planted, and I think that I’m finally coming around to the idea of maybe that’s a thing that I’m possibly dealing with. I’ve taken the dumb online tests and oh boy, do I check off almost ALL of the boxes on every one. My problem is relaying that information to a human person. I’ve gotten so bad at talking to people in the last 10 years. If I go in and say, “HI THERE I THINK I HAVE ADHD FIX ME”, I’m gonna have a psychiatrist be all weird, I’m sure of it. (Probably not, but I mean, you never know.) The last person that I attempted to talk to seemed like they really didn’t want to listen to what I had to say. I’m not sure if they dynamic wasn’t there, or if I was just an asshole. Probably both of the above.
So, that’s where I’m at right now. I’m exhausted, beat down… and I still don’t have any cabinet doors in the kitchen.