Handy Honey: Kitchen remodel- Over cabinet shelf and crown

Bulkheads above cabinets are dumb, aren't they? Sometimes the space above cabinets can be kind of dumb too. Hard to clean, hard to store stuff, everything looks bad up there. Everything you do store up there gets greasy dust on it. You can't win. That is probably where the tall cabinets came from lately.

Anyway, I really wanted to add some crown moulding to the cabinets to dress them up some more. I found this great webpage that had instructions for a shelf along with the crown. Sweet. I love it. Great idea. P.S. You will get lost for hours in that site!

I was compiling a shopping list and realized I already had some 1x3's that I could rip in half with my new (to me) table saw to make the cleats! Here is the dry fit. Then I glued and nailed it (with my brand spanking new compressor and nailgun. The back cleats are screwed into studs in the back as well.

They will not show in the end so they don't have to be beautiful.

Then I bought a sheet of plywood and cut it so that it hung over an extra 1 1/2 inches. (All the instructions are on that webpage.) Again, with my table saw!

Look how nice and smooth the top will be. After I paint it I will be able to actually wipe the dust off once in a while (like every 2 years). P.S. I bought a bit nicer sheet of plywood so that it would be a somewhat nice shelf up there. It was about $24 and I still have some leftover for other projects that come up.

So obviously, the sides of the plywood show. Not good. So I needed some trim to cover it up. Before I ran off to Orange I decided to run by the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. And guess what? I found all the trim I needed and even some crown! I bought all the crown they had in that style which was way more than I needed but I wanted to keep some for when I do the laundry cabinets and stuff. So all of it was 15 bucks but I only used about half of it. Here is the trim being nailed on. It is lavendar. But that doesn't matter! It will get painted anyway! Wahoo!

All the lavendar trim up.

Oh, and I nailed the shelves to the cleats. Duh.

I caulked some at this stage because I realized that little crack might show under the crown.

Here is the crown nailed up! Let me just say, installing (cutting) crown moulding is not for wimps. I wanted to shoot myself. My sister says she and her husband needed marriage counseling after they put their crown up. I believe it! I will have to googlize the tricks to it on my internet machine.