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I created the design for these cabinets on paper originally in August 2004 after moving into our new home. My initial design revealed that I had no idea how to design a cabinet, so I went to various sellers of cabinets and peeked in at their design and construction, and at our own kitchen cabinets, and came up with a modified face frame case design. I think my design is original. In August I decided I'd be better off seeing them on the wall "virtually" so that I could tweak the dimensions and placement before I went to all the work of creating them, not to mention creating a materials and cut list to make sure all the pieces would fit together. My college degree was in Electrical Engineering, so I had some knowledge of CAD. After reading the reviews of several popular CAD programs in the various wood worker magazines, I purchased TurboCAD, which took me several weeks to learn enough skills of creating and manipulating objects to accomplish the plans for this project.

This was turning into a major project. So, by the end of September, I had printed up my plans for these 11 cases, of which there are 4 different kinds: 2 tall corners, 3 short narrows, 4 tall narrows, and 2 tall wides. I spent the month of October gathering the necessary materials to begin, and in November I made my prototype short narrow case using dowel joinery. Dowel joints are time consuming due to hole alignment and gluing, so I was disheartened at how much time it was going to take me to complete this project. About that time, a colleague of mine at work told me about pocket hole jointery. I gave it a try and liked the ease and strength of it so much that I used pocket holes jointery on the rest of the cases. So the prototype taught me several lessons, now it was time for the rest of the project. The rest of November, I made the majority of cuts from the sheets of particle board for the entire project. That took a lot of time. I was glad to have a sharp blade on the table saw. One lesson learned, in the future I will plan my cuts from 4x8

sheet goods to rip the sheet in half to 4x4 with a portable hand saw then cut the rest on the table saw. 4x8 sheets are very difficult for one person to manipulate. My cut materials lay dormant in a make shift storage arrangement in my garage until January 2005, when I began assembly, which took until February. I did not have much room for finished products in my garage, so I began to hang them on the wall as I completed them, which meant I assembled them starting with the corners and working out. Once I had all the cases hung, I started on the trim. At this point, it was March and I began looking into frame and panel door construction methods. This looked beyond my current time commitment to this project, so I opted to order custom cherry doors from Scherr's which I could finish to match my cases. So, in March I designed and produced molding for the top, corners, verticals, and bottom of the cabinets. I had never cut crown molding before, so that took a little research and cleverness on my part since I used my a home built jig

and my band saw. I also covered the exposed sides of the cases with 3/8" plywood with cherry veneer and bottoms with tung oil finished 3/8" lauan veneer plywood, which looks close enough to cherry to serve as a bottom cover. The doors arrived in April and I drilled holes for the hinges and door handles, finished them with tung oil, and hung them on the cabinets. A little touch up on the project in May with more tung oil, and voila! I was done.

Woodworking has been on my mind for a long time. My last project was a simple hat rack back in 1998 which did not require much in the way of tools to accomplish, which was good since I did not have many tools at that time. However, this project required much more than that, so I shopped around and found over the course of the project a table saw, jointer, dust collector, planer, router, band saw, and drill press. Now I have a fairly capable wood shop. It took nine months to acquire the tools and organize my work shop, which is

one-half of our 2 car garage, expandable to the whole garage when necessary by putting 4 of the big tools on rollers. The table saw has been one of my most important tools. I especially want to thank the knowledgeable woodworkers at Woodcraft, where I bought most of my shop tools, and all the others who encouraged me along the way.

You may laugh, but from design to completion, it took me 9 months to build my cabinets. My options at the time were to pay someone else over $5,000 and have them done in a week. Had I worked full time on them, I could have had them done in two weeks, I think, but I did not have all the tools, and I did not have the time available to take that kind of time off from work. So I worked a few hours here, a few there, and eventually, with the encouragement of my family, I finally finished. My final cost in materials is close to $2,000. Of course that doesn't count all the tools which I have acquired, and hope to use again on a regular basis...