Build In Your Refrigerator, step by step

We learned with our first kitchen that building in your fridge is a large assist in making a kitchen look fancy schmancy. And at the moment our floating fridge was looking fairly much the exact opposite.

That is where an also less than schmancy $19 cabinet from the Habitat For Humanity ReStore (mentioned yesterday) came in handy. It is 12″ tall and 36″ wide, the exact width of our fridge. And when you take off the do not-match doors (we are hoping to retrofit extra existing doors to make it seamlessly match the other cabinets later), it starts to look more like a workable piece of cabinetry to sit atop our refrigerator.

For the sides of our built-in fridge, I picked up two 4′ x 8′ pieces of plywood that the Lowe’s guy recommended for cabinet work (he said it is the same stuff they sell folks who get theirs built-in by pros as part of their kitchen installation process). They even cut it to size for me right in the wood cutting area, which was a large assist. The planks were still too big for our Altima so I rented the $19 Lowe’s truck to get it home. The truck rental, fridge planks, plus a few 1 x 2″ pieces of pine trim brought my grand total to about $90. Good thing that ReStore cabinet was low-cost ($19).

The point of the trim pine was to make the front edge look more wrapped up and a bit more substantial looking. So I broke out my trusty Kreg jig and drilled a bunch of holes down one edge of both plywood pieces.

With my holes drilled, I sanded both sides of the plywood to make sure they were smooth. And while I was at it I sanded the finish off the front of the cabinet so it is primer/paint ready (we will tackle it when we tackle the rest of our existing cabinets after the counters get installed so nothing gets chipped or scratched off during that stage).

Then I carefully clamped and screwed the pine trim to the plywood piece so that the edges were flush. Having been around block with my Kreg by now, I have learned that it is sometimes helpful to drill a second hole simply to put the special Kreg clamp into. This is me trying to think ahead.

Eventually (note that I did not say “soon” – this part took me about an hour) I had the trim attached simply the way I hoped on both pieces of plywood.

Attaching the cabinet took some thinking ahead too. Since we hoped the cabinet to sit flush with the trim (not behind it) and needed the opening to be slightly wider than our fridge (which was the same width as the cabinet) – I had to add some filler pieces (aka, leftover scraps). One stack of scrap wood went up at the front of the cabinet and the other was located at the back (neither of which would be seen at all once it was all installed).

Here is the same view with the cabinet sitting on it, to give you a better idea of why the filler was needed (I ended up adding a wooden shim to make sure the cabinet sat 100% straight).

We did not in fact attach the cabinet until we got everything back inside, since I was not about to try to maneuver this whole thing from my patio-workspace through a few doors and into the kitchen. So here we are in the kitchen, with the cabinet screwed to one of the plywood sides. Here is where Sherry put Clara down for a nap and came in to assist.

We brought in the second side and used our camera tripod as makeshift jack to hold it in place while we screwed it all together, checking and double checking that everything was square and level.

Before standing it up we brought in a spare board across the back to assist keep everything straight and supported from front to back. It is also the board we later drilled through to screw the whole thing into the wall (did not want it falling over on anyone!). We also put a similar plank of wood across the bottom (again to keep things square and to allow us to screw the whole piece into the wall).

Then we heave-ho’d it up to a pleasant standing position…

… and slid it into place (after temporarily removing the bottom support slat so we could slide it over the fridge like a slipcover).

We are not saying “ta-da!” quite yet, since there is still plenty to be done to it. Like priming and painting it, priming and painting the paneling behind it, adding matching doors, adding molding around the top, adding trim around the bottom, etc. But for now, we are enjoying one fairly noticeable step towards making the kitchen look a lot more pulled together.

It is certainly an upgrade from the un-built-in version, right?

Oh and if you scroll back up to the built-in pic above this one, you will notice that the fridge sticks out simply a smidge from the wooden sides. That is simply a functional thing (it can slide a bit farther in, but the doors would not open as wide as we needed them to in order to access certain slide-out fridge drawers without hitting the wood frame). But it is pleasant because the new built-in sides block all of the black coloring on both sides of the fridge – so all that is visible is the stainless front (and a smidge of the sides of the doors – which are still stainless). It is certainly going to be a large upgrade to have a custom looking fridge setup along with the flush front cabinet up top (our old above-fridge cabinet was set about 6″ back, so it was a lot harder to access).

So that is the latest slow but steady kitchen progress. Next on the agenda is attempting to finalize the placement of the peninsula (we still need one more cabinet to complete that area) by the end of this week so that we can finalize the placement of the giant eight foot doorway to the dining room that we will be adding with the assist of a pro (which we hope to begin sometime next week!). Is it next week yet? Should be interesting/scary/exciting/dusty. As consistently, we will keep you posted!

Psst- We are over on BabyCenter sharing an update on how we organize and store Clara’s outgrown clothes. And we’d enjoy to hear your storage secrets on the subject.