Like most things in this project, I had an idea about what I wanted, and I wondered if it would be easier to pay somebody to do it for me. Building cabinet doors was never something I thought I was remotely qualified to do. So, I looked up a place online that sells cabinet doors made to order. After seeing the cost of that, and the turnaround time, I once again said, “screw it! I’ll do it myself.”

Before I get into that, though, here’s my kitchen faucet.

I don’t have many photos of this, because the install was very easy. I just drilled the holes, and popped them in. I just had to make sure the hole was the right size. The one on the right is a filtered water faucet, for drinking water.

Just as I was starting the cabinetry, a piece kicked out at me and hit my hand, causing a bruise and a minor cut. I quit for the day. Stay safe out there. I really wish I could say this was the last/worst injury I sustained in this whole project, but that is a story for another time.

Okay, with that out of the way, it was time to get serious.

I measured out the spaces in the cabinets where the drawers would need to go, and estimated the depths I would want. Then, I cut strips on the table saw to get the rough shape of the drawers.

I used wood glue and a pneumatic brad nailer to put them together.

On the left are three drawers that will stack in one cabinet, in the reverse order, so the deepest one is on the bottom. On the right is the drawer that will go under the stove.

This is the bottom drawer in the stack, just sitting in place. They ended up fitting perfectly, once the slides were on.

No faces on the drawers yet, but they opened and closed smoothly, which was a very exciting moment for me.

I decided that the drawer faces and cabinet faces would not be pine, like the seats in front, so I had this leftover piece of nice pine that was perfect for the trim on the utility door. I installed it by screwing from the back side, through the stud, and applying adhesive to the back of the trim piece. Later, I added a couple of latches.

Next up was the cabinet doors. Like I said, I didn’t want to pay a ton of money to wait for some cabinet doors to be made and shipped to me in over a month, so I went to a wood supplier nearby and picked up some materials to do it myself. I watched a youtube video or two on making simple “shaker” cabinet doors, and got to work on the table saw to see if I could make it happen.

I made this by cutting the two longer edges into blocks, then running them through the table saw twice, with about a half-inch of material removed along the edge, to make a channel the thickness of the Vertical Grain Douglas Fir Plywood that I would be using for the center. Then I cut the two shorter blocks, 1 inch larger than I needed them to be. I repeated the same process on them, but had one extra step.

On the shorter ones, after cutting the channel, I moved the blade to the thickness of the distance from the outer edge of the block, to the inner channel. Then I ran them through the table saw multiple times to remove all of the material at that thickness from 1/2 an inch on both sides. The result was a little “tab” that could be inserted into the channels of the longer sides, and a uniform channel that ran all the way around the interior of the frame.

I would cut the inner plywood panel to the dimensions of the interior of the frame, plus about 3/8th of an inch. Then, using a mallet, I pounded it into shape. These are the first ones that came together. I was pretty pleased with myself.

There were a lot of doors that needed to be made, and not enough clamps, so it was a process that took a few days.

I had to glue them up in groups, because I didn’t have enough clamps. Luckily, the glue dried quickly.

I left labels on all of the doors so I knew which ones were for which locations, sides, and which face would be up. I wanted to get them all done in one fell swoop.

I got a forstner bit and some adjustable soft-close cabinet hinges with magnetic latches. The forstner bit was a lot of fun, and I got to use my salvaged drill press for the first time.

For the drawers, we squared up the bottom one first, then used a small spacer to place the next drawer on top of that one, and the same spacer for the top drawer after that. Unfortunately, the top drawer face broke in the process, because the short ends didn’t have enough material to support the inner plywood panel. I opted to just use a slab of Douglas Fir for that one. Most people don’t notice, because it’s so narrow.

While those faces were drying, I installed pneumatic pistons to hold up the upper cabinet doors, which swing up, instead of out.

The pneumatic hinge can lift the doors unassisted. To keep them closed, I had to add a push-latch. At this point, I had not done that yet.

I thought this was the stopping point, but my wife had other plans.

Once the cabinet doors were in, the whole space looked cleaner. I knew there was a bunch of crap in all the cabinets, but out of sight, out of mind! This was a very exciting moment.

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