DIY Range Hood around an old fan

Keep that old fan in your kitchen and update it with a diy range hood all built around an old fan!

How to DIY a range hood around an old fan

Can you build a range hood around an old fan?

Yes, you can easily add a stylish range hood to your kitchen with that old fan you have sitting around! It isn't even a hard DIY! 99% of this hood range was made from scrap lumber. That's my favorite kind of project.

This is our 1x2 frame pieces on top right before we screwed them into the fan.

How do you build a range hood around an old fan?

So this isn't your typical how-to post...more of a "this is how we built our own hood range and you're welcome to gather some info from it". We are not DIY experts by any means. I'd classify us as "practicing" DIY-ers. So, first things first.

Find a design you love (check Pinterest and Google)
Buy or re-use your old vent hood fan
Measure how big an area you have to work with
Get to work!

Can you screw right into a tile backsplash?

Yes! You do have to use a special drill bit designed for tile. Ours was a Milwaukee Tool Diamond Tip drill bit. A hot tip I am going to throw out to you here is that you must keep the drill bit wet while using it. We ruined a drill bit pretty fast by not spraying the area with water. Grab a water bottle and have someone spray the area while drilling.

What is the first step to building your own range hood?

It might be wrong the way to go about it, but we placed the fan onto the wall first. After that, we used 1x2's to frame out the top portion. This gave us lumber to start building off of. Check the photo below for clarification on this step.

This view is the very top of the fan after we screwed it into the wall and added the 1x2 frame around the top. We screwed this directly into the fan as it already had holes in the top.

Once your fan is installed, start building the skeleton.

Now that our fan and 1x2 base is on, we start building the skeleton. We added more 1x2's and a few 2x4's to build our skeleton. See the photos below.

Here's the skeleton coming to life. All of the pieces got built off of the 1x2 frame on top of the vent PLUS we added a 2x4 to the beam up top and also built off of that.

How do you access the fan around a range hood — The 2x4 can be seen easier here. We secured it right into the white ceiling beam there.

How to build a range hood around an old fan — As you can see, we used our KregJig to add pocket holes to the 1x2's. We didn't bother hiding the pocket holes since all of this skeleton is getting covered with underlayment.

We covered the skeleton of our range hood in 5'' wide underlayment so it has a "shiplap" look. Then we framed out the bottom sides with 1x2's.

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Build your own range hood around an old fan.

At this point, we just continued building onto the skeleton. We just designed as we went, knowing we wanted a "finished look" on the bottom 3 edges underneath that 1x2 skirt pictured below.

As you can see here, we created a shaker cabinet type look by turning the 1x2's and nailing them flat to the cabinet. We created this look on both sides of the range hood AND on the door that we attached with hinges.

*Here's the range hood without the cabinet* attached.

How do you access the fan on your range hood?

This is the part that had us scratching our heads. How will we be accessing the on/off switch on our fan if we build a hood around it? With a little ingenuity and a cabinetry magnet, you can accomplish this easily! We built a door on a hinge that lifts up to expose the vent controls. So easy and doesn't even look like a hinged door!

Here's a little boomerang showing what it will look like once the hinges are attached.

To create the door, we made a "frame" out of 1x2's and attached the shiplap slats to the frame.