We Hung Upper Cabinets!

By ourselves! Yesterday, I showed y'all how we stenciled this bumpy little laundry room wall. I love how it looks, but we needed to add some storage back into this space.

How to Stencil a Wall

Once we got to this point on Saturday, we brainstormed weather to go with shelves or cabinets. LB kept coming back to the thought that having a hanging bar would be great, but that he wanted to minimize visible clutter.  The only way I really saw us going with these requirements was to install cabinets. The decision was made and the following shopping list was assembled.

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We headed out into the snow torrent, and found these cabinets at Home Depot for $79 each and decided to just do it (like Nike).

Cabinet

We also picked up these anchors. The HD guys told us that each one of these screws holds 100 pounds each so that even if we couldn't find a stud (we couldn't) these would keep our cabinets super secure.

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To get them in the right spots, LB held up the cabinets on the wall and I pre-drilled the holes using a really small bit.  The holes needed to go through the cabinets  and into the wall so that we would know where the anchors needed to go in the wall.

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LB got the screws pre-prepped for me after we had marked our holes. IMG_4240

And LB drilled the wall holes a little larger so he could hammer in the anchors (the green things). IMG_4234

He held the cabinet back up, I placed the level inside and along the side of the cabinet, and we screwed it right on in. IMG_4242

We did it to the other cabinet on the other side and re-attached the doors! BADABOOM! IMG_4245

The tension bar was then put up between the cabinets. We then reattached the dryer vent and realized that we had a problem: the vent prohibited us from opening the right cupboard even a little bit. So our new solution for a next step (to be done a month or so from now) is to feed the vent up through the cabinet and out that way. We were over this project and all of the arm overhead extending happening currently, so we just left it for now and are using the left cabinet. When we have recovered, we will drill three giant holes: 2 through the bottom and top of the cabinet and one into the ceiling to feed the vent up and out of the way.

Before

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Oh! And I switched out the art work and put the laundry LOVE print outside of the laundry room instead of covering even more stencil on the back wall. I am bummed that the cabinets are hiding so much of the stencil, but I still love the way that it looks.

Even after a whole weekend spent doing this project we've got things left to do:

  • Paint the floor
  • Change the light fixture
  • A butcher block counter top for the top of the washer and dryer
  • Re-route the dryer vent through the cabinet

The good news is that we got the light fixture and some other storage up yesterday, so we're not done in here yet!