Thread: Breaking down and rebuilding a melamine cupboard

This is hardly fine wood working - more like wood butchery, but there you go.

Son and Daughter in law move into a new to them (15 year old) house. Muggins here is called in to do something about the space within the kitchen allocated for the fridge. The gap is some 20 mm too narrow for their fridge. My immediate solution is to remove the adjacent full height, wood grain look melamine cupboard which increases the gap by an additional ~480 mm - plenty of room for the fridge but it puts a bit of a dent into their already very limited kitchen storage. (Would you believe the kitchen also only has one double GPO above the bench, and single GPOs in the fridge and microwave spaces)

The cupboard is left standing on the back veranda for a couple of days and a cursory examination shows it appears to be just screwed together, with little round melamine stickers the same colour as the cupboard melamine, covering the screws. I tell my son I reckon I can take it apart and cut it down to size and put it together again so we load it into my van and I take it home.

This morning I start to take it apart only to realise its not just screws holding it together its also dozens of those sticky 50 mm nail gun brads hiding under those stickers - in short cheap and cheerful construction. With a bit of bashing and minimal damage I managed to get the thing apart but trying to remove the brads completely which are sort of glued in place was a right PITA and I end up just cutting them off and leaving the heads in place..

So that I did not lose track of "what - went- where" I performed a minimal disassembly and removed and cut each piece that needed cutting and then put it back immediately onto where it came off. The cutting was quite easy as I just left the TS in the same position and cut the same 25 mm strip off each piece that needed it. During reassembly I used screws alongside where the brads were.

The only edge that remained exposed after this was all over was the front opening edge of the door. I found a reasonably close match to the wood grain look melamine amongst the iron on edging offerings at Bunnings and redid the door edge. Then I cut dozens of little (3/8") discs from the same edging using a hole punch and just ironed them over the screws and brad heads. Given the cupboard is hardly a quality item it does not look too bad and most of stickers are on the sides of the cupboard and will not even be seen once its is back in its slot.

Took me most of the day - now I need to reinstall it - hopefully I can use the same holes in the walls.