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Once I have decided where to start. I will take the first
cabinet and remove the drawers and the cabinet doors and set them aside in a safe place. I will screw the filler to the first
base cabinet in the corner. If the filler is narrow enough I will screw it from the outside so the screws are not visible
inside the box. If the filler is too wide for this I will clamp it and screw it in place from the inside. To clamp the filler
or the cabinets together I use a 12-inch pipe clamp on a ½ inch pipe. I find this gives me a lot of clamping pressure
and the wide jaw pads won’t mark the wood. I will shim
the cabinet to my level line and check it with my level from side to side, front to back, and diagonally across the corners
and add shims under the cabinet as needed. I will check the fit of the filler piece to the wall. If it isn’t tight all
the way along the wall it will need to be scribed to fit correctly. To
scribe the filler I will first apply light colored masking tape to the filler on the face next to the wall, then with the
cabinet still level I lay a pencil flat against the wall and the tip against the filler. I will find the spot along the filler
where the gap is the biggest and pull the cabinet back until the pencil is just on the edge of the filler. This way I take
as little off the cabinet as possible. I then double check that the cabinet is still level and run the pencil down the length
of the filler making sure it stays flat against the wall and at a right angle to the cabinet. I then lay the cabinet on its
back on the floor and use my belt sander to remove the wood to the line. I will leave the masking tape on until I know I have
a good fit to the wall. I will also not trim the ends of the protruding shims under the cabinets until I am done with all
the base cabinets.
On a face frame cabinet I will remove the drawers and doors of the next cabinet
and set it in place against the first one. I shim it until it is level and even with the level line and with the adjacent
cabinet. I then clamp the cabinets together near the top, leaving room to get a screw in within 3-inches of the top. I put
just enough pressure on the clamp to pull it together. Then with a piece of scrap hardwood placed against the face of the
cabinet I will tap it with my hammer to line up the cabinet on the face and the top. I then use a countersink sized with a tapered drill bit for a #8 X 2 ½- inch screw. A little beeswax on the screw will help the screw go in
smoothly. Occasionally I have a situation where the wood has bowed slightly
and there is still a slight gap between the cabinets at the top. I then use a drill bit slightly larger than the screw threads
and drill through the face frame of the first cabinet only. Then when I screw the cabinets together the screw catches the
wood in the second cabinet only and pulls it up against the first one. I
put three screws through the face frame where each set of cabinets joins. One near the top, one at the bottom and one centered.
I always place the clamp as close to the point where I want to screw it as possible as sometimes the drill bit will follow
the grain in the wood and actually push the cabinets out of alignment.
The rest of the base cabinets will install in the same manor. Occasionally it
happens that I have misjudged the levelness of the floor and come upon a cabinet that, when leveled it is actually higher
than the rest of the cabinets or the level line. In this case, rather than adjusting all the rest of the cabinets already
in place, I will measure the distance it is above the desired height and remove that amount from the bottom of the cabinet
in the same manor that I scribe the filler. Sometimes I will also use this method if I have a situation where the end of a
run of cabinets is on a finished floor and would need to be shimmed up enough to leave a significant gap at the floor on the
finished end of a cabinet. I will then start at this end and scribe and sand the bottom of the rest of the cabinets to lower
them to this level. This can add a significant amount of work but looks much better than apiece of molding at the bottom of
the cabinet. Sometimes on a high-end house there will be a separate decorative end panel that can be set tight to the floor.
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