ScottnSherrie wrote:
Odd as it may sound, making cabinets is not terribly difficult if you have the right tools and at least moderate woodworking skills. Otherwise, I agree with the suggestion to have a cabinet shop build one for an exact fit.
My concern is mounting the cabinets. In my RV, the cabinets are secured to supports in the ceiling.
It is nearly impossible to take a ready made store bought cabinet and making it fit/work in a RV without destroying the cabinet. You will find that ready made cabinets tend to be deeper, made of thicker/heavier materials. All of these items make them to be less than ideal.
As stated in the quote above ultimately it is far easier to make your own from scratch.
If you study the existing cabinetry you will notice that it is made of a lightweight wooden frame (1x1s typically) which is held together by staples. Then a thin 1/8" paneling is glued and stapled to the frame. Makes for a light weigh cabinet (much lighter than 1/2 particle board cabinets sold in the home centers).
You can easily mimic what the manufacturer did but use a little larger wood framing material (IE 1x2 or even 2x2) which won't need a special stapler to assemble.
For mounting the cabinet you have several options, typically the wall studs are 1x2s turned so the wall thickness is 2". This only gives a spot of about 3/4" on the wall stud to hit with screws. Makes finding the wall studs difficult at best (electronic stud finders tend to get confused with the 2" thickness so they are not 100% reliable).
I would try to locate all the studs as possible and use plastic hollow wall anchors in between the studs for good measure (these are the ones that when a screw is tightened the anchor expands outward against the hole in the paneling).
I will warn you if you decide to drill, screw, nail, staple into the walls be very careful about electrical stuff. With 2" thick walls the wire is not very far from the surface of the walls (and in some areas of a RV there can be a beehive of 120V and 12V wires!)
You can take a look at a PDF I put together of my TT rebuild which shows some of the construction of walls and some of my new cabinets..
HERE (you will be my first test of this new document location). Do note that the crummy PDF viewer the link opens shows my photos in some sort of low resolution. If you want to see the pictures a bit better you will need to save a copy and open it on your PC...
