{How to easily customize builder cabinets}

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We have pretty much wrapped up the bathroom finishing, so now we are focusing on the basement kitchen/bar.

Before we started on this process, we had a couple bids for custom cabinets.  Super pricey for just the 6 cabinets that we needed.  We did a little measuring and it turned out that all of our cabinets were actually stock cabinets and we could easily purchase them @ home depot or lowes (we ended up going with home depot).  I did have to paint the cabinets to get the color that i wanted, but it was worth it to save the $1000.  I will work on a post to show the before/after of the cabinets.

There are of course lots of ways to easily customize builder cabinets and one of the easiest is to add molding.  In this case, we decided to add base molding instead of a traditional toe kick.

By adding base molding, it quickly transforms the look of the entire cabinet and gives it a built in, furniture type look.  And who needs a toe kick anyways?!  No one ever stands that close to the cabinet, so its not necessary and its just another place to get dirty!  I added base molding to my upstairs kitchen island a while back and am so much happier with how easy it is to keep clean rather than a normal toe kick.

Anyways – just a few cuts and you can easily customize your cabinets too!

For our cabinets, we needed a baseboard that was at least 4 1/2 in high  but no more than 5 in high that way i easily had enough room to nail the baseboard to the cabinet but not to high that the cabinet door wouldn’t close.

I needed something to nail the baseboard to on the floor, so i cut some furring strips, glued those to the floor and nailed them to the cabinets.  If you don’t do this step, the baseboard will just get kicked and be pushed back, it needs that bottom support to keep everything in place.

Next i glued all the edges that would be touching wood as well as the bottom part of the base molding that will be on the floor so that everything stays put.  After gluing,  the baseboards are attached to the furring strips as well as the bottom of the cabinet with a brad nailer.

That’s it!!  So easy huh?!

You most likely will have a few corners to wrap around at the end of your cabinet, you wouldn’t want to just end the molding at the end of the cabinet, except if you were at the end of a wall of course because it will look unfinished.  So, there will be a few corners where you will need to do some mitered edges.

This pic below doesn’t show what i am talking about the best, but you can see that the molding was wrapped around the corner where the dishwasher is.

So of course everything needs to be caulked, nail holes filled and painted, but then its all done!

As soon as i can get to it, this is for sure going on my list of projects to do upstairs!  It makes such a difference.  But 1st i cant wait to get this 2nd kitchen done!  The mess is driving me bananas!!