plum tree place: Our DIY Double Oven Cabinet

I am so, so happy. We have an oven....in the house!

It is finally finished. We have owned the house for a year. We have occupied the house for almost a year. I've had a cooktop for about five months. I talked about that here. And now we have an oven. Just in time to be able to bake some goodies. I can make some cookies to celebrate!

We have had our double oven for quite a long time. I blogged about it here. We got it second-hand from a suburb of Chicago which I found on Craig's List. It was barely used and a price we couldn't beat. I looked up a similar model online to see what it would cost new. Almost double.

So it has been sitting in one garage or another until this weekend. It was not easy to get into the house. But Scott, the boys and I managed it somehow.

To start- we bought three sheets of cabinet grade plywood from Menards. This stuff is not cheap. But it is very strong and matches the cabinets we got from Barker Cabinets online. The wood veneer side of the board already has a shiny, protective coat on it. The reason we built this cabinet is because it is much cheaper, but not easier. If we had it in our budget we would be ordering the rest of the kitchen cabinets we need from the same place. But that isn't possible right now.

I measured the oven and figured out how deep and wide we needed the cabinet to be. The first pieces we cut were the side pieces of the cabinet. Then we cut out the shelves. The screws we used were the strongest and biggest I could find without splitting the wood. We pre-drilled all of our holes first.

For assembling we brought the pieces into our entry room. The floor is much more level than our garage and we didn't want to scuff up our wood floors in the house.

Then we ended up moving it the house close to the space where it would go so we could check measurements.

I had an idea to build little shelves in between the wall oven cabinet and the wall. There is a doorway with trim right next to where the cabinet would go. I was worried about the door of the oven not clearing the trim around the doorway when the oven was open. Scott went to work trying to make that happen.

He built a tall and narrow box to take up some of the depth because it didn't make sense to have four inch shelves that went back 27 inches. I hadn't even thought about that detail.

We also put braces along the back of the cabinet and used those pieces to attach the cabinet to the wall. The narrow shelves were attached to the wall first using Kreg jig pocket holes. Then we put the cabinet next to it and screwed the cabinet to the shelves from the inside of the oven cavity.

The problem with plywood is the raw edges. You can see the layers of wood stuck together and it doesn't look very nice. That is where this comes in.

It's not expensive but makes it look so nice. It isn't too difficult to apply. You just use an iron. But the hardest part is trimming off the excess after it is applied.

We also had to reroute the electrical down in the basement. There had been a previous electric double oven but it was in a different location. The wire wasn't long enough to reach our new location so we had to undo it and bring it a different way so that it could reach. Then there was the fun part of trying to find the right spot to drill the hole, installing the box and hooking all the wires back up. I didn't get any pictures of that part.

There was a certain point during this process that I panicked a little. What if the oven didn't work? We bought it second-hand over a year ago. It sat outside for a year. We built a cabinet specifically for it. What if?

But I am here to report (very happily) that it does indeed work. We lifted it into the space and flipped the breaker. I've never been so happy to see a blinking clock in my life. I also turned the oven (both) on to make sure it got hot.