CabOver Cabinet Project

Building your own cabinet in your cabover!

Your cabover! A terrific place for a cabinet!

Sometime ago, we converted our CabOver area into a giant pantry shelf. Quickly this shelf became a catch-all for everything that did not have a place. Our CabOver area was a mess! When guests came to call, we pulled the drapes to close our CabOver from view. This messy shelf was an embarrassment!

Items stored in this giant CabOver pantry shelf were difficult to find. There was no easy way to sort stuff out.

CabOver Pantry Shelf before cabinet project

When I was invited to use Don Bowen's woodshop, it was an easy decision to choose to build a CabOver Cabinet in order to straighten out the mess in our cabover area.

This cabinet uses the plywood floor of the cabover area as a cabinet bottom. The cabinet top and shelf form a big "U". Both the top and shelf are identical, except the joints are in different places for strength.

In the pic below, I am installing the cabinet. In order to easily fit the cabinet parts into place, the top and shelf were split in half and joined together once in position. I am holding a pin nailer, essential for easy assembly of the glued wood parts.

Assembling cabinet pieces.

Each face frame part was assembled to the cabinet in place. The pin nailer was used to secure the face frame parts to the cabinet until the glue dried.

In the pic below, most of the face frame has been installed and stuff loaded into our new CabOver Cabinet.

Items stored in new CabOver Cabinet are easy to see!

Below is a closeup view of all the items replaced in our new CabOver Cabinet. It is so easy to see everything, and easy to sort stuff out as well.

Close up of NEW CabOver Cabinet

In the pic below, the cabinet doors have been installed on our cabover cabinet to complete this project!