Craft Room Project: A Whole Lotta “Well Crap!”

So… those wonderful materials I went and bought yesterday and had to rent a truck to get home? Yeah, they aren’t going to work.

I honestly don’t know where my brain was at when I was picking the panels out I thought I was going to use on the fronts of my cabinet doors, but it certainly wasn’t in my head where it should have been. The panels are way too thin to work for what I had planned. Not only that, but the back side is crap and wouldn’t look good painted at all. I don’t know why those things didn’t click when we were pulling them down. Even seeing the mess of the edges, because these are the standard composite kind of crap you often see in these kinds of things, didn’t tip off my brain that something wasn’t right.

Do you know when I realized that I probably wasn’t going to be able to use these? When I was supposed to be sleeping, of course. I spent half the night tossing around all my options and not really coming up with a solution.

When I ran out today to get the other pieces I needed and couldn’t get yesterday (completely different pieces and actual wood, thank goodness), I looked at some other options, but again, couldn’t come up with a solution.

The problem of this being too thin is that it won’t fit in the grooves of the framing for the doors. I considered getting some other material and putting it together with these to fix that and give me a decent paintable surface for the insides of the doors, but none of the options I looked into are going to work.

The other major problem is how fragile this actually is. Again, I really should have figured this out when we were looking at it and known it would be a bad choice for a cabinet door. It doesn’t take much to dent it or break the surface to where you see the dark core material, a really bad thing on doors that are supposed to be white.

I had really wanted wood for this, but couldn’t find what I wanted in the sizes I needed and was one of the biggest reasons I looked at these panels in the first place. Now that I’m looking, I can find this in wood, but in much smaller panels (which do not need a truck to haul home) that are more expensive by quite a bit when you compare the overall square footage price, which is honestly to be expected when getting wood vs. composite crap. That said, I’m not certain the actual size will fit my groove.

Have I mentioned the fact that I absolutely despise that building materials aren’t the actual size they say they are? A board that is label

Now I’m struggling to figure out what to do. I have 5 panels of this stuff that I can’t use the way I’d planned. To return them, I’d have to rent a truck, again, to get them back to the store.

The pieces that I think I might want to use aren’t big enough to do the few bigger doors I have planned. I might be able to pull off doing those doors with a center cross section making them a two panel door instead of one. It is doable and will look good, but it is a little more complicated to pull of than the simple single panel.

We have seriously talked about doing a semi-finish in parts of the rest of the basement when this project is done and using something like a nicer paneling like this that we can paint in those areas. These could work for that, but it may not be all that clean and it wouldn’t completely match the pattern of the cabinets (which is kind of what I was thinking it would do). That and we are so far from ready to do that, these would end up sitting around the house until we were ready, taking up room and potentially getting damaged. Again, it is still an option that would keep me from having to return them, but it isn’t a great one.

I knew that I’d most likely make some mistakes along the way that would force me to get more materials than I planned for, but I honestly didn’t think I’d manage to screw something like this up. Of all the things that I could have managed to get wrong, it had to be the biggest pain in the butt pieces to get home.

What is funny and not at the same time is that I had just bragged to Hubby about how I’ve been doing a really good job of taking advantage of sales and cash back rewards and, in this case, using my rebate I’d gotten on my counter tops to keep costs down on this project. Apparently I’m just as good at turning around and negating those savings.