I’ll start this post by giving you a little history into our thinking for this project.  Let’s go back in time about three years to when we moved into our new house.  One of the first things that we decided we wanted was a corner cabinet in our dining room (along with a finished sun room, but that’s coming soon too!).  We didn’t have a huge amount of furniture and with just a table and chairs in our dining room it was looking a bit sparse.  A corner cabinet would do a nice job of taking up some space and also give us a place to display some of those great wedding gifts we got.

Once we’re all settled into the house we begin looking for some corner cabinets and quickly find out that the type we like are expensive!  We’re looking for a corner cabinet/hutch that has a closed cabinet section on the bottom, with a few shelves up top, similar to this one, but we really didn’t want to spend $7-800 dollars on one!  That put us off for a while and we sort of gave up the search.  We ended up painting our dining room and adding a chair rail all the way around, ignoring the gaping hole where our sought after corner cabinet deserved to go.

Fast forward a few years up until a couple of weeks ago.  Elane and I were trying to be well organized by hanging another bike rack in our garage to keep the herd of bikes in line.  This particular member of our bike collection wanted to be hung on the garage wall that is against the house, shared with the dining room on the opposite side.  While I’m doing my manly routine with the power drill all of a sudden we hear a CRASH from inside…..uh oh.  Our first thought was that the dog got into something (she has grown up quite a bit since here and has been known to get into some things!).  We rush inside ready to do a little scolding, only to find the puppy cowering in the corner with fear…hmmm, what was that noise?  While I try to calm the puppy down (a big scared dog can do some damage!) I hear Elane walk into the dining room and exclaim “Oohh MERCK!”  Merck, which if you’ve spent anytime with any of the Gottshall family would know, is their version of an expletive, translation “Oh !*#@.”  I quickly join her in the dining room, she’s right…..merck.

My macho power drill wielding in the garage vibrated the wall enough to knock a picture frame off it’s hook.  Not such a big deal, as it didn’t break the glass and the frame survived for the most part.  However, in it’s suicide leap off the wall it managed to hit our chair rail on the way down.  Of course, saving a little money when we put the chair rail up, we went with the cheap, composite, balsa wood, no structural integrity what-so-ever type, which means it had no shot at surviving a run in with our rather large picture frame.  Turns out, our attempt to be a little more organized in the garage, led to a chair rail being broken and ripped off the wall….merck.

On the plus side, what this incident did was to bring the corner cabinet discussion back to the front of our minds.  Since we were going to have to re-do the chair rail anyway, why not add a corner cabinet?  Sounds like a plan!  We still didn’t want to spend $800 on a cabinet, so we decided on a built-in solution.  Of course, being sort of handy people and also money conscious, we decided to build our own, instead of hiring a carpenter.  You know what that means….I get to make all sorts of saw dust, sweet!

And because I’m still sorting through all of the pictures that we’ve been taking throughout the progress of our room renovation, I’ll just leave you with a little teaser.  Enjoy!

Corner Cabinet Sketch Preview