Charlie Custer

Project Report: Kitchen Cabinet #1

I figure I might as well use this rarely-updated blog as a place to log my journey in woodworking as I slowly try to replace/improve the cheap furniture in our house. I have made a few pieces of furniture prior to this, including the desk organizer and exercise bike table/tray/thing I’m currently using, but this is the first major piece I’ve built, and the first that isn’t made from box-store pine.

The long-term goal here is to replace a bunch of the ugly extra shelves we have in our kitchen to hold all of CY’s baking stuff with nicer-looking furniture that hides it. This cabinet, step one of that project, is designed mostly to hold baking sheets and smaller tools.

I’ll share some progress pics along with a few final images and learnings:

This cabinet began its life as sheets of baltic birch plywood, which I acquired from Atlantic Hardwoods and O’Brien Hardwoods in Portland. Pricey stuff, but much better quality than Home Depot plywood.
Cutting sheets down to size is easiest with a tracksaw. I don’t have a tracksaw, but this Milescraft track and the attachment it comes with turn a regular circular saw into a pretty functional tracksaw for a lot less money.
I opted to label pieces with blue painters tape rather than pencil or chalk — I just find this much easier to quickly spot than having to search all over the wood for wherever I might have scribbled something in pencil. You can’t miss blue tape!
I was quite nervous about this step, cutting all of the dadoes into the side pieces for the shelves to sit in. However, it went pretty smoothly.
Test assembling the side pieces and top/bottom. The top and bottom are attached with dowels, though I didn’t get any pictures of any of that process.
Finishing the sides with the dadoes taped so we don’t get any finish on surfaces that will be glued later. Clamps in place and the top and bottom pieces are already being glued in.
Shelves in the basement as the finish cures next to the dehumidifier. Scraps on the floor are from the nightmare that was edge banding — more on this later but I likely won’t do it again!
Shelves in place and getting glued in (I only had enough clamps to do four at a time). We decided to assemble this in situ because I knew it would be heavy — this made the kitchen a mess for almost a week, but it was the right call as the final piece is indeed very heavy.
Stood up in place, and with the doors attached! This was before I realized I had to remove them again to get the final shelf in. Note also the drawer box in the foreground and slides in the bottom of the cabinet for the drawer.
Doors removed to glue in the bottom shelf, and drawer box inserted into the piece (but still without drawer face attached)

And finally, the finished product:

The finished cabinet with doors and drawer closed.
Finished cabinet with doors and drawer open, and (mostly) packed with stuff. (CY is waiting to fill the drawer until after she gets some organizers for it).

In the above image you can see why the top shelves are so tightly-packed (4″ between each): I designed them to hold a bunch of baking pans and sheets. The middle shelves (7″) are for holding bigger stuff, and the bottom shelf (14″) is for holding some tools to get them off our counters (air fryer, food processor, etc.). The drawer is for whatever.

Lessons learned:

Overall I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, but there were some takeaways:

First, I do not have a good handle on how long any of this takes. Over the course of this build I made many predictions about when it would be done, and most if not all of them proved to be wildly optimistic. As were my cost estimates…

Second, I dislike edge banding. I don’t know if it was the banding I bought, the tools I was using, or (most likely) user error, but there was a lot of tearout when I tried to trim the banding down to size with the Fastcap trimmer, and it resulted in a bunch of spots that look pretty ugly up close. Luckily many of them are hidden by the doors, but in the future I think I’ll just use thin solid wood strips rather than pre-glued veneer like this. That’s more hassle up front, but I think it’ll be easier to get a great-looking final product. (As this project went on, I started using the Fastcap trimmer only for a very light trim and then went over everything by hand, trimming it flush with a chisel — this worked better but still wasn’t perfect).

The next project promises to be much simpler, although it also needs to be more visually flawless: a coffee table.

Charlie Custer
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