IKEA Hack Custom Kitchen #13: Building the Island

hey how's it going i want to do a video on uh building a kitchen island here made out of ikea stuff and how i'm modifying it to make it work for what we need um i'm going to try doing this video a little bit different i'm going to actually video kind of a different segments and sort of splice it all together so we'll see how it looks in the end and um let's start with uh the first thing i'm doing here so on the floor i don't know if you can see this tape here kind of got some tape on the floor like mark's uh kind of like on a stage and that's the uh that's the approximate location of where this cabinet's gonna end up being and you see the big coil right there that's the electrical line i'm using armor-clad mc cable that's 20 amp rated so i'm going to run that up and start providing power into the unit itself the unit's basically three boxes so the one on the left with the little little gray looking thingy that's a trash can that has a power activated uh push mechanism which uh i'll show you in a second here in the middle this is gonna have a speed oven and microwave and then a drawer that i did a little video on on building a custom drawer here and then on the right is just um kind of like wire shelves and then on the far right over here i'm going to try to build a little wine rack system as well as some outlets for plugging in like iphones and stuff like that so that's basically the design i'm going to show you guys a couple things that that i did that should help make things better um number one ikea sells like really really bad feet uh for these islands they're like horrible so i already did a video on this but um this is the foot that i'm using and you can see them down underneath there that they're all along the bottom and what they are is a is a composite so what it is is the uh the metal feet that they sell so these metal feet actually give me a second so i don't know if you can see this but these metal feet screw onto this post just like this um this post is welded uh there's like lots of places to screw in bolts so you get a really really strong fit this particular thing is called uh capita one eight six one two keeping score at home there um the only problem is that the toe kick won't clip to this because it's designed for like an open look so to get around that what i did unscrew this so if you have this little metal foot you pull off the bottom it's like a cork stopper and you go buy the ones that are designed to work with the with the toe kicks put them over top and it will actually see this but if you push in it's going to clip in perfectly the diameter is perfect i go crazy with uh a glue gun i just fill this with glue from a glue gun and then uh put the bottom stopper back on and now that thing is uh much much stronger you can put that back in your in your little uh metal rail there just like that and then this is a the clips that go with the toe kick they'll clip on and it's going to be wicked strong compared to the things that they give you so that's first thing i did i went down there i i replaced it i'm using eight feet i'm using uh one under each of the ends and then one underneath each one of these sections right here these upper sections to try to pick up the load and try to help keep the box together i've also cross screwed the box together to try to kind of tighten all those together second thing i want to show you guys real quick here so let me show you what the ikea drawers normally look like so when you build a box um they put these brackets on here so these little guys and then they sell it comes with this kit here so it's called uh sectin i don't know what that means in swedish um but it's zero zero two nine eight four one one and they sell this piece of wood with it and the idea is that you're gonna you're gonna put that behind you're gonna bracket multiple boxes together but as you can see it's really only like um let me pull back a little bit it won't reach the full length of three of these boxes it's also kind of flimsy i mean if you ask me so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna use two by fours uh big long two by fours to tie the whole thing together but if you notice down at the bottom all they give you is a way to tie the top together um what i ended up doing let me show you in this box here so what i ended up doing here let me zoom in a little bit is i put these brackets on the bottom and i cut out this little notch on the panel so now the the panel is the same on the top and the bottom uh there's actually these uh you know brackets opened up um and i'm gonna run two two two by fours so i'm gonna run a pair of two by fours on uh on this back section and tie all these together all the way across like that so that'll give me a lot more strength and eventually there's going to be an overhang for for uh part of the quartz countertop and that will give me something to bracket to put the brackets into um so i'm gonna run one two by four on the top one two by four on the bottom and then i just gotta figure out how to kind of secure them together with so i can use the bracket system uh so that's what i'm working on right now i'm working on the electrical and i'm working on kind of tying this together and modifying these so that they can fit two sets of two by fours and uh i'll give you guys an update here in a little bit and we'll come back and show you how things are going all right here we are on the other side of the cabinet welcome back um this is uh how i'm gonna be doing um all the framing on the back of the cabinet to kind of tie everything together and give me a good stable platform to anchor some brackets as well as how i'm gonna do some of the back panels here so um what i ended up doing uh kind of as i described there is i ended up putting a long two by four along the top another pretty long two by four along the bottom and then i just cut up some two by fours uh to get some uh vertical pieces like you see here these poor vertical pieces um one thing so i don't know how experienced people are but uh when you're buying your your wood at the store one of the most important things you're doing is just making sure you get a nice piece anytime you're checking wood um to make sure it's straight look down the end get really nice clean straight pieces of wood especially like two by fours uh not all two by fours are created equal and so you know i bought the premium version of the two by four the four dollar and fifty cent version uh got really nice straight pieces because this is gonna be like a spine for this uh kitchen island so you want to kind of invest in like nice pieces take your time get some good wood that's not all bowed and makes everything really hard to put together later on um so this is kind of like i said the spine to the the back of the cabinet if you've ever seen like an upright piano they have like a really solid frame behind the piano to kind of keep everything together it's the same idea here uh over on the left here i'll come over here and show you so that's how i'm mounting my brackets so uh as we looked at it before okay go down here show you a good view here so we've got the um the piece that's connected to the ikea cabinet this will be bolted right onto there and then i've got this piece this nice piece of angle iron this is i think quarter inch steel so it's super super strong way stronger than the job's going to need unfortunately what's going to end up happening here is i'm going to end up having a panel that rests here so i had to recess this bracket into the 2x4 so when you have it like this let me show you real quick so once it's recessed like this then you won't have any issues with anything obstructing a panel that ends up getting put on here by recessing it and i'm going to show you how i did that and then uh you know like i said i kind of built this little uh this little box here um i'm going to show you how i put it together i'll show you the tool that i used if anybody's interested and that will kind of help explain things so used a lag bolt on here really short one and this isn't the final one this is just sort of for uh explanation all right so we'll take this apart and uh i'll show you how i put it together here for framing purposes so let me go right about about there all right so i'm going to pull up on this so give me one second here i'll show you how this is framed together that's good enough all right so uh what this is is uh this is using a mortise and tenon system uh that festool does so when you're doing something like that you end up drilling these little uh these little mortises in and then it uses this thing called the domino it's kind of like an oblong dowel puts it into position that lets you tie everything together with a really nice straight strong joint plus it indexes the wood and keeps it in the right position so that later on when you get your bracket the brackets will will fit on nicely and everything will look good so to if you wanted to use a system like this you could um it's pretty basic so this is the tool you use it's called a domino tool so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna put these little two pieces of the wood together so all right so what i did is i put a little uh hole in the end of this one and then i put a hole on the far end of this one and start put the domino in there they click together and there you go now you've got that uh that kind of frame piece um the other thing i had to do to to do mine is i had to um kind of cut out this this channel here and cut out this piece so let me show you how i did that real quick so we'll go over to the table saw but essentially what you do to do this is on the capex table saw there's actually this little feature right here when you click it down it you can turn it and what it's going to do is it's going to lock the blade so the blade doesn't go too far down so when you're cutting with this again this isn't plugged in right now what it's going to do is it's going to prevent the blade from going all the way down i'll show you what that looks like so it prevents the blade from going all the way down and essentially what you're going to do is just do a whole bunch of passes with the saw to cut a whole bunch of little strips out and then once you get cutting off get done cutting all the strips out you'll have a piece like this where it's notched out definitely make sure that the pegs still fit in there i probably should have put the mortise holes a little deeper uh i wasn't really thinking about having to recess the the bracket when i made those holes but there you go all right so uh first off um i used this tool when i was putting together the frame this uh festool uh df-500 cube this thing is crazy expensive um i wouldn't buy it for this project i just happen to have it so i wanted to show how i used it in this little project but you can do as much with a nail or a screw and actually nail up through the through the two by fours just wanted to go ahead and show what i'm using this for so um i used some tight bond glue to put it together if you haven't used what glue this is the stuff i love this stuff and now everything is bracketed together grab the camera here kind of show you a few things so there's the brackets i used a couple of these larger fast grip lag bolts uh onto this thing they are short enough that they don't go all the way through uh but they've got a nice strong head so they'll be able to keep the brackets from from snapping the heads off and then i used a ton of these cabinet screws so everywhere you have the pieces this all screwed together um and that's gonna make it pretty darn strong and uh when i get done i'll show you this real quick when you get done you can uh use these little ikea ikea trim pieces to cover all this up so it'll look when you're looking from the cabinet side it'll look pretty good and like i said you can use it on the on the lowers and the upper pieces and then finally uh the next step i'm going to do is we're going to uh cut some of this stuff so this is just a cardboard particle board chipboard i don't know what you call it it's called like fancy cardboard uh melamine foil backer and we're gonna put it on and that backer is gonna fit uh over top of this because we recessed this all in so um we're gonna cut a big slab throw it on here and it's basically gonna act kind of like the panel does on this side and hides everything it's going to hide everything and then we're going to go from there get ready to cut the back panel that i'm going to be using um kind of as a kind of make it look a little nicer behind the the kitchen island before i hang my actual um hardwood panel doors so i want to show real quick how do i cut this stuff down working with sheet goods so over on the left here you can see a regular sheet of wood we're going to be using this for the countertop kind of temporarily plus it gives us a way to kind of mock up what it's going to look like because we're going to use a waterfall island so i'll show you how that works in a bit but how do you break those big sheets of plywood that are in the us they're four by eight uh which is a giant piece of plywood how do you break it down to usable sheets i use a track saw system um you know some people on channel probably already some people watching this probably know exactly what i'm talking about some people don't so i'm just going to cover real quick so basically there's tracks the saw goes on there it glides down you're going to see it in a second here and it cuts um whatever we want to cut um i bought two sizes of track and i kind of think this is like the optimal size unless you're cutting something huge like gymnasium floors or whatever i use the 3000 uh millimeter rail and a 1080 that's 1080 rail those two rails as you can see it's long enough to cut down a full-size sheet of plywood it's rare that you're working with something over that length you can actually put them together there's a piece that allow them to connect together but i've never used that it's easier just to move the giant rail over this size over three three meters basically is what that is um it's just so unwieldy i can't imagine working in a house with it because that there's another one that's like 5000 meters but i wouldn't or 5 000 millimeters five meters which is pretty darn long that's basically what it is so recently i had to replace the um splinter guard on that this is the splinter guard and the nice thing is it's made for the 5 000 uh millimeter rail and that lets you replace the splinter guard on both of them so that's that's awesome uh to get a square angle i use a nice woodpecker square woodworking square that i've used forever it's great you can line it up to the rail but most of the time i'm just making tick marks on the wood so i've made tick marks on both of this pieces of wood right here and then what i did is i used this stuff it's called frog tape um and it's like a green tape uh which is kind of cool it's festool green but that's not why i bought it uh well maybe a tiny bit why i bought it but basically it is really nice masking tape that comes off and they also make like a delicate version what i'll do is i'll just tape the rail down and then when we cut it there's no chance it's going to sneak away i'm cutting it on just some owens corning foam insulation and i am cutting on a hardwood floor if you're going to do this make sure that your plunge does not go through your foam because that'll be a super sad day for you when you start cutting up your floor by accident um or especially if you're on concrete you'll know pretty quick but i just bring it a little tiny bit underneath and i just use this like a cutting board i've been using the same there's actually a piece of foam underneath the big piece to kind of prop it up so we have a square angle i've been using the same thing for like i don't know a long time a couple years and seems to last forever so let's look at uh let's look at a cut and uh then i'll bring it over and i'll show you how it's going to look so there we go perfect cut nice and clean uh leaves a factory nice edge because the rail sits on top of what you're cutting uh it keeps it squished down so that that means that you're not going to get splintering or anything and that's what that splinter guard is for all right we're back at the island uh getting ready to mount up the panel that we just cut so i've got the panel mounted on here i'm going to put a few more screws in but i wanted to show you before i get all the uh all the door panels mounted on top of it so the reason i'm using this melamine panel um at all is i'm using the doors that you can buy from ikea and i'm gonna mount them on the back when i'm out three of them and they're gonna act kind of like a panel system to kind of give it that shaker look there's gonna end up being a little gap along the side because these doors are a tiny bit smaller than um if you add three doors together you end up a little short with these little gaps doesn't look bad actually it looks kind of cool so i need the melamine behind there so that there's something to fill in the gaps um the doors i'm using in case anybody's interested i'm using the zero zero three one three five zero five these are the 24 by 30 door made in hungary these are made of solid ash a nice hardwood and really been happy with them this door is actually one i got from that side um because we ended up putting microwave in so i had one door so i just went ahead and bought two more and i'm gonna use these as my panel um i'm mounting them unfinished uh and if you're going for the unfinished look you'd be done we actually are gonna paint them i'm gonna paint them all i'm gonna paint all this stuff all at once i'm setting up a little paint booth in the basement once i get to that point and i'll do a little video on hvlp painting it is so much easier to paint this stuff in a paint booth in a controlled environment flat not vertical much nicer finish much easier to work with and you're not craning over and trying to do anything difficult so um what i'm doing to screw these in is i'm just screwing in from the back here so i've got a two inch screw it screws in through that little gap that we had on the back um and then that screws into the panel a good half inch or so and that that makes a really good connection and i'm doing one in each four corners into the meat of these rails and styles you could do ship lap you could run the panel all the way down to the floor if you were going for that more slab look you could do wayne's coating if you wanted to build this out so it looked like a table you could build legs and do everything but fundamentally you really want a strong 2x4 spine to this thing a frame to build off of because if you don't have that strong foundation everything you throw on here isn't going to look good usually finished pieces like this are more aesthetic than structural so you kind of want that structure underneath there so that's what i'm doing on the panels here i'm gonna finish that up um the whole point of the brackets is so that we can have an overhang like this and that overhang will allow us to have chairs underneath uh we're gonna build this island out of or the top out of quartz um you can actually overhang quartz a pretty decent amount because it's a synthetic material up to about 12 inches but it's always nice to have structure underneath it just makes it much stronger and i know kids i know that eventually they're going to be sitting on here and the next thing you know it you know bad things happen so definitely overhang if you can try to structurally support it um we're gonna end up having a waterfall island that goes up this side and then across and then i'll show you what we're gonna do on the other side in a second but let's talk about structure for for these overhangs so there's a little problem with ikea cabinets let me show you on this side here one of the problems with the ikea cabinets um or one of the cool things depends on how you want to see it is there's no face frame to this thing so this cabinet is essentially made up of three pieces of wood a side bottom and another side there is a back to these things but it's just plywood i mean it's not even plywood it's just like cardboard like this is just this just makes it look okay what's holding it together really are these extra metal straps on the top but normally when you're trying to cantilever out to put in something like a uh like an island bring it around to the side here so you can see that a little better you're trying to cantilever out to do something like an island you would tie in a long metal strap to the face frame and then to the middle and then you would have this the structure so that you could extend that out and cantilever over the island uh um and have your kind of bar stool area there's no face frame to tie into so it kind of creates a problem you have this like metal bar but it's not really all that strong you could try the cantilever onto the actual slab pieces on the side that's probably what i would do but that's why i've gone in with this bracket system because i want to really tie it in and i want to have something pretty strong so that's the way i kind of did it but there are other ways to do this particular process um the last thing is so one side is going to have a waterfall this side is going to be our little wine area we're not huge wine drinkers but i want to store like six to ten bottles um so what am i gonna do on this side well you can see here you got your slab your two by fours your uh sandwiched piece of melamine and then your your door i'm going to build a custom panel just like that door and this is uh this is the beveled edge of what it would look like and this was from another piece that i ended up not needing but if you over extend that and bring it right along this side you can totally cover all that up and it will look super nice it's gonna it's gonna basically be like a custom sized door that'll stick on the side we'll screw it in from behind and it's going to look really good and then we'll hvlp paint it um one thing i'm sort of thinking about as i do this is electrical so we had thought about doing a waterfall on both sides that's just where the countertop comes up goes across and then comes back down and hits the floor only problem is electrical if you do a waterfall this is a great place to put an outlet i don't know why but i just can't stand cutting through a giant piece of you know stone and putting an outlet in the middle of it it doesn't it doesn't hey i don't know style-wise it didn't i didn't dig it as much plus i kind of wanted a little area for for wine so uh mounted up the panels uh there's the brackets um we may not end up needing the brackets i'm not 100 sure we're going to see uh how much overhang uh ends up happening in the design uh if we keep the overhang small enough i'll just end up taking those brackets out but if we have a longer piece then i'll definitely need them so i'm glad i did the uh two by four thing anyways get ready to electrical or i said should say i've already done electrical but i run run my electrical inside the um uh behind the speed oven and i'm getting ready to cut out a section on the side of this uh panel but here's the tool i'm using um if anybody's ever probably a lot of people know what this is but this is a fine multi-master and it's got the sustainer so i use that a lot just by the blades throw everything in there and what that's really good for is this particular job so let me show you what this works for here so we're going to cut a hole and it's got to be a square into this panel um so i've already kind of started these sides i'm using a 2x4 on the back so it doesn't tear out when i cut through because melamine will definitely tear out it's like a chipboard so basically just set your tool where you want it i kind of guide it with my hand [Music] my [Music] [Music] um the electrical that i'm using is a uh 12.2 uh armor clad or mc cable um and i'm gonna put that outlet on the end and that will be the one outlet that we need for the end i'm not gonna show how i'm doing the met uh electrical honestly um i'm not a professional electrician i'm not don't feel comfortable that i would be showing people the absolute correct way and electrical stuff has a lot of codes a lot of rules i know them from where i live i pull the permits i do all the work but that's totally different if you live in a different city different state different countries so obviously you know do your research if you're gonna do any electrical but that's the way i'm doing mine so uh just wrap this up here and um finish doing the electrical and then maybe i'll do a little closing video got this outlet it's one of those uh kind of outlets now that they sell that has the um usb built into it as well as this is a 20 amp outlet so you can plug in you know crock pot or big mixer or whatever you wanted to do a vacuum cleaner that kind of stuff um we've got ours sort of opened up here so it's good to see the way we're doing the storage this is our kind of little pantry drawer it's three baskets so you open it up and you got the baskets in here and you can store a lot of the really bulky items that wouldn't fit anywhere else i do i did have to have the box kind of exposed on the inside unfortunately um it'll be a little further out eventually and do a video on building a wine storage area for the end here and i'll show you how i how i do shaker doors on a on a festool um router table so i'll do a little video on that got the speed oven wired in and cooked something onto tonight worked great i've got the small drawer at the bottom here so there's the drawer at the bottom speed oven built in and all the wiring i did back there and then this is the trash can i thought this is kind of helpful um so you know trash is a big uh thing in a kitchen you got to make sure you have you know some kind of trash system we used to just have the the trash can sitting at the end of the counter this is much nicer so people probably seen these at ikea but basically what you do is it's sensitive to you pushing on the door there's actually i'll show you what what makes it trigger it but if you push on the door so normally i'd bump it with my knee so i'll show you how i normally do it so here's my knee [Music] there we go never works the first time for camera so all you do is you know you just push on the door and that triggers the mechanism and the way the mechanism works i'll show you back here so hopefully uh hopefully you can see this on the overhead here i'm going to close it this little device back here um kind of closes and senses the pressure and then when you push there we go it opens it shuts i usually kind of kick it on the lower side of the door so it opens pretty well you can also just pull on it so if you pull on the knob watch that works well but a lot of times you get stuff in your hands so that mechanism is made by a company called blum blum and it's made in austria this is really high quality uh well-made uh stuff that ikea actually somehow got the ability to sell um it's not that expensive compared to what it would cost you if you went and kind of made it uh like a custom cabinet shop and in fact it was cheap enough relatively speaking that i bought a spare just in case this one ever burns out so those are the blum uh the blum automatic opening you do need to have electrical back there to do that and i'm gonna show you the trash can situation here um because again this is a you know i know it's dirty but this is an important part of the kitchen here so um open the door here never works when i'm trying to do it on camera you'll notice that all right so we put two trash cans in here they are also sold at ikea and they fit a 30 gallon uh trash bag so we put them in there we have different colors so that's actually trash and that's recycling it's great that these fit 30 gallons they they're a little bit small for 30 gallons so there's a little bit of extra space but actually when you're tying up these bags it's great holds a lot of trash before you have to take it out so you know we use it all the time it's pretty easy you just kick it throw your trash away shut it works great probably the best trash solution i've ever had and then above it we actually have a drawer i'm gonna drop this in here so you can see how it looks so this drawer is super helpful because it holds the trash bags so these are huge reams of trash bags that we keep up here as well as a few other things for the dog and the vacuum cleaner and what's nice is this flush mount so when you go to shut the trash show you here so when you go to shut the trash it just hides on the back and you don't even see it so when you need to change the bag they're right here you grab a bag throw it in there and shut the door and you forget that there's even a trash can there which is like the best thing ever all right so uh that's what the island looks like so far um i thought it was kind of cool since i didn't have the top on to kind of show you the way we're putting ours together i did we tested this a little earlier got it up really really hot as high as it would go and as you'd expect it's certified to be put into a wood cabinet and it was cool to the touch around the sides a little warmer on the back but they've got more of a gap there and again it wasn't too too warm so um so yeah so that's what we got so i'll probably call it quits on this video here and uh i will do one on building the wine rack in a little bit as a separate video i hope this stuff helps somebody trying to build an island i know it's a lot of detail but you know i was trying to figure out how to do it and i wanted to share my experience and what i did especially if you have to support an overhang on the end how you can tie that together all right good luck thanks

Channel: Post & Beam

Views: 1,231

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

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Id: 0Yxn1ezKyH8

Length: 36min 8sec (2168 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021