So let me start by saying that I have a kitchen cabinet job to do for my elderly grandmother. She has been in poor health and my family all went in together and built an addition (apartment) onto my aunt’s house for her to live in. I have many uncles, aunts and cousins and many of them chipped in and did tasks like wiring the electrical, drywall, carpentry and plumbing. I must say that the addition turned out beautiful.
This is where I come in…Being a woodworker, I was asked about the cabinets for the small kitchenette. I consider myself to be an intermediate woodworker and as such did not hesitate to try and tackle the job even though I’ve never built any kitchen cabinets. I started doing some research and some modeling in Sketchup and realized that kitchen cabinets are much different than the furniture I’m used to building. But so far it has been a nice change of pace and I really enjoy it.
The first thing I decided to do was to build a new router table. I burned my last one when I remodeled the shop and haven’t gotten around to building a new one. I knew I would need it for moldings and such. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I wanted to do a dry run on a base cabinet carcase and also wanted a cabinet style router table, so off to buy a sheet of plywood. After I got home, I jumped right in and almost immediately I realized that it sure would be nice to have 7′ rails for my table saw. I got around the capacity limitation by measuring and clamping a straightedge along the left side of the workpiece and running that along the left side of the saw. It worked well, but was a pain ( I have since ordered the 7′ rails…should be here in 3 to 5 days ). Anyway, the Birch plywood base cabinet turned out beautifully ( my opinion here ).
I installed a shelf in the bottom and eventually plan to install a deep drawer in the space below. I also plan to construct some tall narrow boxes with bit drawers in the left side, electrical on the right side and some baffles in the center section with a dust collector hookup.
I think I accomplished my goal as I completed the cabinet in about 2 1/2 hours and gained a little experience with standard cabinets. Next onto the top and a nice new router table.
