DIY Kitchen Range Hood
She’s beefy, she’s beautiful, she’s a champagne taste on a beer budget, she’s my new DIY kitchen range hood. This thing was honestly one of the quicker, easier, more budget-friendly DIYs in our kitchen remodel but I procrastinated getting started for weeks because I was nervous about the angles I’d need to calculate for the slope of the front of the hood.
But, if I’ve learned one thing in my 30 years of being bad at math, there’s always more than one way to do something so instead of attempting trigonometry, I just trial-and-errored it until I found my solution and I’m here to give you all the details so you don’t have to waste any time (or scrap wood.)
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DIY kitchen range hood tools and materials
Tools:
Materials
The design
We had a couple of objectives in the design of this DIY kitchen range hood, the first being that it had to be nice and wide to cover an unexplained pipe we have running up the wall near the ceiling. Don’t know what it is, don’t know what it does, don’t want to spend any money trying to remove it, so we worked around it.
Secondly, being so wide, I knew I wanted it to slope in toward the top so it wasn’t just a big rectangle on the wall and I wanted it to make a statement in the room because it’s one of the first things you see coming through our front door now we’ve removed the main wall between our living room and kitchen.
Thirdly, it had to be a ductless unit with the controls on the bottom panel so we could easily reach up to turn it on.
This Hauslane ductless vent hood ticked all the boxes and we’ve been really happy with it so far (being ductless, it uses charcoal filters instead of venting outside to suck up all the grease and smoke from your cooking).
The build
The inner structure of this DIY kitchen range hood is basically a frame of 2x4s. Our vent unit came with directions on the opening size for the unit which we followed, then I built around the rest with 2x4s to make a rectangle that I then secured into the studs in the wall with long construction screws.
From there, I built upwards by making two shapes (I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m bad at math and I don’t even know what the shapes are called: Trapezoids? Hemorrhoids? You know what I mean)
After a few attempts, I found that seven is the magic angle number.
I bevel cut my vertical pieces to seven degrees at the bottom end so they’d slope from the front of the range hood closer to the wall as it goes up to the ceiling, and I cut a 15-degree bevel at the other end to give it a bit of an angle to sit more flush with the ceiling. It wasn’t perfect but it worked.
The bottom piece of that shape was also angled to seven degrees on one end, and the top piece was angled too, but the straight piece going up against the wall didn’t have any angle cuts.
From there, I used construction screws to secure all the pieces together into the slope shape, and needed Alex’s help to hold that longer angled piece because it was a pain to hold in place and drill at the same time.
Once that was done (times two to make one for each side of the range hood), I screwed it into the already attached rectangle that holds the actual vent unit, and into the wall to make sure it was tight.
At this point we plugged the vent unit in and attached it to the 2×4 frame with the screws provided (much easier at this stage than when everything is covered up with plywood in the next step.)
Wrapping around the frame
The bottom part of the frame is wrapped in 1x6s with crown molding around the top and a 1×2 sitting horizontally to finish it off. The trimwork is kind of a make-it-up-as-you-go thing and really just personal preference but I felt like this combo gave it some personality without being too over-the-top.
For the top part of the frame, I just nailed a thin, 1/8th” sheet of plywood around the whole thing. Again, instead of calculating angles for the pieces, I just trimmed the plywood down to the right height and held it up against the frame to literally trace the cut I’d need to make, then I took it outside and cut it with the circular saw. It worked perfectly, honestly I even surprised myself.
When the plywood was on, there was a gap at the bottom where it met the crown molding part because of the angle, so I just added a strip of shoe molding along the top to cover that up.
On the top part, I continued the 1×4 we’re using around the rest of the open living space, so I cut some little spacer pieces to nail to the ceiling which made the ceiling trim stand upright against the angled hood vent.
Painting it black
I went back and forth for a long time on whether to paint the vent hood the same black as the cabinets and in the end I decided to go for it. It’s just paint, right?
I love how it turned out. I feel like it gives fancy chef and not reheated frozen pizza which is exactly the vibe I wanted in here.
Overall, we’re so close to being done with our long haul kitchen renovation and these finishing touches are making all the difference. We’ve still got baseboards and paint touch ups and a few little things left, but expect a full reveal with alllll the photos so soon.
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