Last summer, we were finally able to remodel our kitchen. Truthfully, I had very little to do with it. My wife designed it all and we have a great contractor that’s upgraded most of our house.
But my job was to make some shelves. We want to have a couple of 6′ long floating shelves that could support a lot of weight. I looked into various ways on how to make them and ended up making a frame with a solid walnut front piece. Then I veneered some panels for the top and bottom. I wanted it to appear thicker (1 1/2″) but not too chunky either.
I also made a cabinet on the other side of the fridge that’s also made of walnut and holds a microwave along with some other things. This turned out to be a nightmare for me, but it looks fine as long as you don’t look at it closely.
I was trying to make it fit perfectly and that was my biggest problem. Walls are never straight and things are never perfectly level. I should’ve made it with normal dimensions and angles and used shims to straighten things out when mounting it. But I thought I’d try to match all the different angles perfectly.
It would’ve worked out ok if I could’ve dry fit all of the pieces easily. But I had to assemble some of the parts to conceal the screw holes, and it just got too heavy to keep doing this. So I put together the pieces, hoping I had everything right. And of course, I didn’t.
I made the sides angled to match a crooked wall, so that it would appear straight. The problem was that I assembled them on the wrong sides and I think upside down. So the end result is the angles went the wrong way. I couldn’t really take it apart because I veneered over the screws, so I had to use a ton of big shims to straighten it out. Nobody even looks behind counters, but if you do, there is a huge gap and a wood block to straighten it out. So, it wasn’t my best work and there’s no picture for this one, even if the main problem isn’t visible.