"This is looking less shitty by the minute" ~ Matt Oyer

Oven project

Looking a little bit like Dexter

This past Saturday started with no plans (aside from sitting around and doing a few errands) until Halley suggested we finally rip out our dysfunctional wall oven. I was a little surprised, but enjoy spontaneous demo as much as the next guy so we started smashing stuff.

It started with a bit of "exploratory breaking junk" (which didn't really go so well, it turns out there was a stud directly behind where I swung the first hammer. We tried again with a bit more success and proceeded to poke around. We found it was mostly empty (thankfully) and our idea of replacing the antique with some DIY shelving.

What were they thinking with this electrical line?

We took out the oven, pulled the 220V line down into the basement (deal with later, for now we just capped the line and left its independent breaker off) and tossed the oven to the curb. With the oven out of the way, we proceeded to sawzall/hammer/pry/karate chop the rest of the studs and supports to leave us with a nice clean slate to do some terrible construction work.

Living proof of the "do your best, and
caulk the rest" motto

We lined the walls with plywood, and made the shelf supports from 2" x 2"s. The previous electrician took a shortcut and just ran the electric to the wall outlet (for the fridge) on a diagonal, so we decided to take a short cut (mainly because this is a temporary fix until we gut/redo the entire kitchen) and just place one of the shelves directly on top of the electrical line to hide it. We found ourselves saying "I really don't care that much" a little too often during this project, which resulted in a lot of caulk and great stuff being used to hide things.

After all the shelves were in, we mounted drawer slides to another piece of shelving for the bottom shelf. The shelf material we had wasn't deep enough, so we scavenged and found a test piece of oak (we had from the steps we made for our living room - I don't think we have anything about those on the blog, we should put a picture here) and added that to the end (we were lucky it was just about the perfect size)


Once this was all done, Halley decided she wanted another shelf, so we took them all down, and re-spaced them out for four shelves. We then threw some molding around the edges, and a curtain rod/curtain to complete it.  The curtain will be hemmed so its not sweeping up the debris on the floor.

Shelving in..

...curtains up...

...kitchen gear inserted!

Time lapse of the whole project.  There are segments where we're both off camera...because we're in the garage cutting plywood, 2" x 2"'s or melamine shelving.