Pantry and Kitchen Trim

Welcome back to the kitchen project. This time I’m going to get into a lot of the trim work, which will pull together a lot of this room. 

Here is the stack of trim ready to be installed. I’m going to start in the pantry, because the backsplash has been installed so I can do all of the trim in there. 

I’m going to start with the back wall, because the window sill establishes the height of the wainscot cap, which then establishes the length of all the V groove panels.

Next I’m going to install the wainscot cap. 

And then next up is the paneling in the corner and under the window. Unfortunately the window isn’t going to be centered in the paneling. If I had wanted that to work out, I would have had to move the window to the right, which would have been pretty difficult. I’m going to be off center by about an inch, which… I’m not going to worry about it at this point.

I got the baseboard set parallel to the cap rail so that all of the paneling will be the same length. Trying to make it easier for myself as much as possible. 

As I’m installing this last piece of paneling, let me share a mistake with you. These panels are too wide. They’re supposed to have six inches of coverage, but when I was making them, I made the distance between the Vs six inches, which doesn’t account for the actual gap between them. So there is supposed to be even spacing, but as you can see, we’ve got a narrower rip here at the end to account for the wider than expected boards. 

I’m going to move on to the backside of this door now.

Now switching to adding the caps. I already cut and fit these ones, just to give you an idea. There is a thicker top piece, and then a 3/4-inch cove molding beneath it. The ones going into the casing are a little more complicated because the cove mold is supposed to terminate on the cap rail, and then the actual cap piece comes around and returns back into the wall.  

Now I can get these casings installed and finalized, and then I’m pretty much done in here for now. 

I’m going to move onto this wall over here and start getting the cased openings installed. 

All right, the band board, head casing, top jamb, and side casing are all cut to length. For the side jambs, I’m thinking about putting them in but leaving them loose so that I can remove the jambs when I do the transition to the dining room. 

I can’t install any of the jambs on this opening until it actually gets opened up and the sheet rock is cut through. I won’t cut this until near the end, because that will disturb our current kitchen. So I am just going to set and prep this casing to be ready to receive all of the jambs when the time comes. 

The stone guys stopped by and installed the sills in the windows, so now I can install the trim. Of course, I’m running into a problem. My head casing has a nice bow in it, which isn’t a big deal. But the bigger problem is that the window on the right is significantly higher than the other two. I’m thinking I can tweak the top jamb of the window with a pry bar and push it down.

Here are those windows all trimmed out, and it makes a pretty big difference. So between these windows, the cased openings into the kitchen, and the pantry, I got a lot of work done in here!

Thank you as always for joining, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the kitchen build, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have, and until next time, happy woodworking!