Indoor Camping: Fixing Up the Fixer-Upper

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Building Pride

When Home Depot called to say our Mill's Pride kitchen cabinets were in, Charlie was so excited he forgot to tell me. Once he got them home, he hasn’t been able to shut up about them.

Even though they’re a topic of many an interesting conversation, they weren’t touched for weeks. Charlie took three days to work up to doing the crown molding in the living room. Working up to the kitchen cabinets for three weeks seems appropriate somehow.

Today’s the day. First Charlie set up a work area. It doesn’t matter that the living room is the next room over, and the miter saw has been resting there for at least a year. New room = new work area.

You wouldn’t want to move things. The living room isn’t done yet. If he cleaned up, it would somehow admit defeat. This logic explains why the whole downstairs is one huge work area of house jacks and tools covered in both normal dust and sawdust. If you squint, you might think someone could be in the middle of working down there. You’d have to squint in the dark and probably take off your glasses first.

Squinting comes in handy when trying to assemble things. Assembly instructions are often either too faded and poorly printed to read, or more likely, only make sense in a very random world. If I have to read the instructions to assemble anything, I give up and give the project to the kids to figure out.

I like solving the assembly challenge without a manual or guide. There’s so much more satisfaction available when you succeed.

Charlie is a little more conventional. He likes to look at the final diagram, where you can see all the pieces put together and on top of each other. This last drawing scares him into going back to the first drawing and following the instructions carefully. Otherwise he’d follow my method and likely end up with unconventional-looking cabinets.

Charlie has his own corollary about assembly instructions. He says, “The quality of the instructions is equal to the quality of the cabinets.” This is a scary thought when you’re staring down a couple of dozen cheap Mill’s Pride kitchen cabinets unassembled in little flat boxes.

Consumer’s Reports reviewed kitchen cabinets for their August 2004 issue. Of all the cabinets reviewed, Mill’s Pride is the cheapest by $5.

When you go Mill’s Pride, your thriftiness is rewarded. Mill’s Pride received three “very good” colored circle ratings and only two “good” circles. I would have been happy with all good circles to save $5. That’s a Starbucks trip for Charlie and me.

Charlie says, “I turn a blind eye to the crumbs of particle board that lie in the bottom of every carton I open.” These crumbs might be the reason for the lack of “excellent” rating circles. You don’t want to think about if these particle board crumbs are pieces of your future cabinets or simply the result of a messy factory?

Once the cabinet pieces are free from the constraint of cardboard boxes, they don’t look much better. “Even though we paid only a third of what normal cheap cabinets cost, they still look cheap,” Charlie says. “They’re sandwiched pieces of laminate and particle board a monkey could make. With every box I open, I feel more ripped off.”

He calms down, though, once the assembling begins. He starts to realize Mill’s Pride employs more than monkeys when it comes to who they employ to do the design.

Charlie has spent his construction career perfecting the idea of hiding mistakes. “It’s how I work,” he says. “It’s also how the designers at Mill’s Pride work. What comes out of the box looking like a K-Mart coffee table you’d buy for $20, ends up looking pretty good.” They do a good job of hiding all the cheap joints and crappy plastic hardware which holds the cabinets together.

Charlie looks at the plastic joining pieces and can’t understand how they can keep the things intact. He takes a breath every time he stands a cabinet up on its own, not believing they’ll hold together. They do, and they do it completely hidden.

Then there’s the wood glue. “Today’s wood glue is a miracle in modern technology,” Charlie says. “It’s the reason for my carpentry success. Before, you’d glue a joint, clamp it overnight, and pray in the morning that it’d stay together. Now all you have to do is clamp it for an half an hour and it’s together forever. You can save your prayers for more important stuff, like straight walls.”

The saying in construction is, “Measure twice and cut once.” With this wood glue, Charlie says he has to measure five times and glue once. “You can’t hide misgluing mistakes. If you try to pull something apart, half the cabinet comes along with it. It’s stronger than the particle board it’s gluing together.” Particle board is no match for anything, especially quality and today’s wood glue.

There’s another obstacle to Mill’s Pride cabinet assembly: pre-drilled holes. “If you’re not careful, putting the fasteners in these holes will rip the particle board,” Charlie says. “Particle board is not a traditional carpentry material for good reason. It crumbles. It wants to return to its’ natural, original state of being sawdust.”

When you’re assembling cabinets, your mind is left to wander. Charlie saves the “inspected by” labels included in each box. I think he’s just messy, but he won’t let me throw them away.

“I’m saving them,” Charlie says. “I was thinking it’d be fun to take a road trip to the Mill’s Pride factory. We could meet PJ and DM. I think about how much power they have over the country. If they came to work hungover, or distracted by an argument with their spouses, think of the ripple effect they’d have. Thousands of cheap bastards like me would also end up hungover or fighting with our spouses as a result of missing Mill’s Pride pieces. You don’t know frustration until you’re three-quarters done with a cabinet and the only thing keeping you from fulfilling your kitchen dreams is a five-cent wooden dowel.”

Charlie’s mind may wander, but he’d getting things done. He finished the first cabinet and leveled it to the wall. “Surprise,” Charlie says. “It’s extremely out of plumb.” He was going to have to work out the gaps with the filler piece.

About this time he remembered he was going to tile the floor. “Putting backerboard down first might be a good idea,” he said. “Good thing I attached the cabinet with screws. I use screws when normal people wouldn’t hesitate to use nails. I screw up. Screws unscrew. I’d give up on carpentry work without screws.”

It took him five minutes to reinstall the cabinet once he put the backerboard down. That five minutes was after he unscrewed the cabinet, attached the trailer on the Jeep, went to Home Depot to pick up the backerboard, came home and nagged the skateboarders to get to work even though they were working, screw down the backerboard, then rescrew the cabinet into the wall. Five minutes became an hour and a half, but at least he got in a trip to the toy store and an excuse to tease teenagers.

Then his attention turned back to the filler piece. This is the piece which fills the hole between the wall and the cabinet. Charlie had to scribe it and grumbled because most people get to skip this step. “Most people have walls which go up toward the ceiling in a relatively straight line,” Charlie says. “We live in a piece of crap. Crap, as you know, allows you the opportunity and thrill of reshaping everything to force it to fit.” This house was built in 1972. People used drugs a lot more liberally back then. I’m guessing 90 degrees is hard to find when you’re trippin’, man.

Charlie couldn’t get the filler piece to fit. This is where the miracle of caulk comes in, Charlie says. “There’s not much a tube of Alex’s caulk can’t fix. Alex’s,” Charlie says, “not the cheap stuff. You can put the straightest piece of trim on the most wavy, crooked wall, and Alex’s caulk will make it appear perfectly made for each other.

Charlie starts the next cabinet and I took a peek at the instructions. They look complicated, but easy to follow, even for someone who would rather guess than read. Charlie says, “Every time I start one of these cabinets, I think, ‘How the hell is this going to go together? Won’t this show? Won’t that look awful?’

“You decide to lose your pride and humble yourself to the wisdom of Mill’s Pride. When you have faith and finish, you find the cabinet turns into something you might find yourself being proud of. That’s the pride in Mill’s Pride. Now I know what they’re talking about,” Charlie says.

Charlie says he’d give them an “excellent” rating circle. “Everything is a detailed drawing of how things fit right down to the gnat’s fanny. I haven’t found one mistake in any of the instructions yet,” he says. “Their 1-800-help line representative must be bored out of his or her skull. If you can’t put together Mill’s Pride, you should stay out of the kitchen.”

A little help? [] 5:20:58 PM