Scary Cabin

With the knee wall trim work mostly finished, it’s time to start building and installing the “cabinetry” that will make up the storage solutions. The back bedroom will have two open dog “cubbies”, two doors, two drawer units, and 6 tip out drawers.

If you start looking for tip out drawers, most of the information you find is for converting the under sink panels in kitchens and baths to tip out trays. You might also find some information on tip out bins for things like recycling or trash. What we want is a tip out drawer that is somewhere in between those two. Since these will be at the top of the knee wall, they won’t hold much, but we do want to make the best use of that space that we can. Rev-A-Shelf makes some soft close hinges for tip out trays that looked like they would work, but would they handle the weight of a tip out drawer plus contents? We ordered a couple to try out and then built a couple of tip out drawers to test them on.

Looks like they’ll work, but the installation is a bit tricky. Luckily we did this in stages and that resulted in a process that worked. First we cut and fit the drawer fronts. Then we mounted the hinges to the drawer fronts, placed them in the openings and mounted the hinges to the frame. Removed the drawer face from the hinges, built the the drawer part, painted and re-installed. With the drawer fully built, there would not be any way to attach the hinges to the frames while attached to the frame while still being attached to the drawer. So with the first two tip out drawers a success, it’s time to order more hinges.

Having a woodworking shop at home, it only makes sense to build the cabinet doors there. We built the two doors from poplar and made them a bit over-sized so that final trimming could take place on-site. With a little bit of fine tuning, the doors fit nice in the opening.

However, that’s when the problems started. While the face of the knee wall is fairly flat and plumb, the inside edges for the door opening are a little less, what’s the word … precise. It looks like there may be a slight twist in the side which make the top and bottom hinge angle slightly different, resulting in the top and bottom outside edge of the door being off by quite a bit more. The worse door was over 3/4” difference between the top and bottom. Looks like we’ll need to shim the hinges to get the angles matching. If the hinges were mounted to the face frame, this would not have been a problem, but someone thought it would look a bit nicer if the inside of the door opening was a bit more finished looking.

A lot of filling, sanding, and painting has most of the knee wall looking pretty nice.

We also built one of the bottom drawer boxes to see how it would fit and validate the design. The design seems to work (but the box is too big to fit in the back of the SUV, good thing we have roof rack!). The next challenge will be sourcing drawer slides that will work for the extra large drawer. The current design has the bottom drawers at about 35” deep x 41.5” wide x 10 or 11” high. Not a slide you can go down to your local big box store and pick up. The rest of the drawer boxes (and probably drawer’s too) will be transported unassembled and assembled on site, lesson learned.

Back bedroom

1. Dog cubby baseboard
2. Dog cubby outside trim
3. Figure out knee wall design — getting close
4. Knee wall door trim
5. Build/install bookcase
6. Install hangers for clothes
7. Install drawer carcasses
8. Install drawer boxes
9. Install drawer trim
10. Install baseboard
11. Trim wall to ceiling corners
12. Install conduit for ceiling fan
13. Build new ceiling fan mount
14. Install new ceiling fan

Front bedroom

1. Paint balcony door
2. Frame knee walls
3. Trim knee walls
4. Door for closet
5. Drawers and doors for knee walls
6. Install baseboard
7. Install wall to ceiling corner trim
8. Install conduit for ceiling fan
9. Build new ceiling fan mount
10. Install new ceiling fan
11. Install grill cover for vent fan
12. Install window blind