cabinets

We had a tough time deciding what to do for cabinets. Thought about rescuing/restoring the old ones we found in one of the ruined apartments in our ell, but those were in bad shape, and kind of cheap and depressing to begin with. I did a bit of shopping around to mass-market cabinet places, home depot etc, and found absolutely all of the new cabinets to be really ugly and way too expensive. So, because we’re crazy, we decided to BUILD OUR OWN CABINETS instead! As if we didn’t have enough projects to work on.

starting the kitchen cabinets in my dad’s workshop

My dad is a very handy carpenter and has a nicely fitted-out woodworking shop that is just perfect for such a project. We set to reading all kinds of books and articles about cabinetry. Richard has a very organized collection of woodworking magazines that have advice and project directions and everything, and Mike got us some exhaustively detailed DIY cabinetry books. It was all kind of dizzying and overwhelming to me, but Richard is really in his element here, and he managed to sort out all the options and explain most of it to us. We now know the difference between dadoes and rabbets, pocket screws and biscuit joints, plywood and laminates, shaker style cabinets, colonial, modern, european, etc etc! Richard got to buy some fun new tools for his shop, and jumped right in to experimenting with different materials and joinery. We figured out what seemed like the easiest and most attractive construction, a super-simple shaker style cabinet with pocket screws and biscuit joints.

Richard and Mike at work on the first cabinet

It took us about a full weekend’s worth of work to get the first one, the under-sink cabinet put together. A lot of setting up workstations and jigs, drawing plans, spatial thinking and painstaking carefulness. I never could attain this degree of carefulness on my own, but that’s where Richard is helpful, he’s absoultely meticulous, as a carpenter should be.

cabinet plans, clamping everything

This project has honestly been one of the funnest parts of the whole house so far, it’s really exciting so far and it’s been so great to spend time in the shop with Richard, learning new stuff and making this amazingly beautiful and tidy thing. Hopefully it will be just as fun to finish the cabinets – we’ve only just begun, lots more work to go!

mike drills in pocket screws for our first cabinet! This is the under sink cabinet on the workbench in my dad’s woodshop.