Sprinter van: Galley cabinets

K long-ago hatched the plan to use Ikea kitchen cabinets for our conversion. She had a few convincing reasons:

• They came in a depth of 15" which would give us more floorspace
• They came with everything necessary to have finished cabinets
• They were about the same cost as buying the supplies needed to build our own
• We'd save a bunch of time not having to design cabinets

Boom. Sold.

The only catch is that Ikea didn't have all of the sizes we needed that would fit our layout. We needed two 12" and one 18" open cabinet along with a 15" 4-drawer cabinet. They had the 15" but no 12" ones. Thankfully, they had a bunch of 18" ones. We'd take two of them and, well, pull off a good ol' fashioned Ikea hack. Literally, with a hacksaw.

It was an easy matter cutting the wood pieces down to size, then making templates to drill the holes we had cut off.

The metal brackets that hold the cabinet walls rigid, however, were a little trickier. Nothing too difficult. While K assembled the cabinets, I'd cut, drill, and bend the brackets to fit the smaller cabinet size.

To attach them to the van walls, we used the wall bracket Ikea provided along with - yep, rivnuts.

It was then a simple matter of following the rest of the Ikea instructions to secure them. K made an awesome call going with these for our cabinets. Clean and simple. Along those lines, for a countertop we went with a sheet of 3/4" plywood.

For the cabinet fronts, we had picked up a piece of wood in the Ikea As-Is section for $10. It was marked, 'Crafting Person.' Alrighty then, time to craft. We ripped it into the sizes we needed for three drawer fronts and three overhead cabinet fronts. It was convenient that Ikea, along with not having the 12" cabinets we needed, also didn't have the 5" tall cabinet fronts. And that they had a nice big piece of wood that would work and, well, look pretty cool as a nice accent.

Scott helped us install the little door latches. A tedious job I was happy to hand over to him.

The cabinets were a lot of work, as pretty much every stage in this conversion has been. But, all things considered, straightforward and pretty simple. What we had to do next, unfortunately, wouldn't be.

Next up: Overhead cabinets…