A running build log from the shop.

This is the stage where a couple months of shop work suddenly starts looking like an actual kitchen.

The boxes are in, the appliance openings make sense, and the long cabinet runs are finally tied together in the room they were built for. There is still a ton of detail work left at this point: scribing, fillers, shelves, adjustments, touch-ups, and all the little things that make the difference between “installed” and actually finished.

I like this part because every decision from the drawings finally gets tested against the real house. Walls are never as straight as the model, floors are never as flat as you hoped, and that is where careful fitting earns its keep.

Getting close!

Here is one of those cabinet details I can talk about for way too long.

Inset doors and drawers sit inside the face frame instead of covering it. That means the gaps around every front become part of the finished look, so every door and drawer has to be fit cleanly.

Add a small bead around the opening and you get another shadow line wrapping each front. It is a tiny detail, but it changes the whole cabinet. The finished work feels more like a piece of furniture and less like a row of boxes with doors stuck on the front.

It is definitely more work. I’m also a complete sucker for it.

Painted, cherry, and walnut versions all read differently, but the basic idea is the same: clean reveals, a little extra depth, and a ton of detail when you get close.

These are the kind of shelves that look like six boards and an afternoon until you actually start making them.

The boxes are mitered so the face, top, and bottom read like one thick piece of cherry. That means the corners have to close cleanly, the long runs have to stay straight, and the grain has to keep moving instead of looking chopped up at every edge. There was a lot of clamping, checking, taking things apart, and checking them again.

Then they went through sanding and clear finish. Cherry is extremely satisfying here. It looks fairly quiet on the bench, then the finish hits it and all that warmth shows up at once.

The finished set wraps the corner on one wall, with a matching pair on the other. The black brackets keep the support simple, and the cherry gets to be the interesting part.

Nothing magical. Just careful milling, clean miters, a good finish, and a wall that is a lot more useful than it was before.

Finishing is the stage where every little mistake suddenly becomes extremely obvious. Super fun!

The actual spraying is only one part of it. Before that there is sanding, dust cleanup, test pieces, masking, more sanding, and a lot of checking the surface in different light. Then the first coat raises the grain, so everything gets sanded again before the next coat.

These parts went through the whole process until the wood felt dead smooth and the color looked even from part to part.

I love a good clear finish because it does not try to turn the wood into something else. It just makes the grain look better and gives the cabinets a surface that can handle being touched and used every day.

This machine rules.

An edge bander takes the raw edge of a plywood cabinet part, glues on a matching wood edge, trims it, and cleans everything up in one pass. The part goes in looking very much like plywood and comes out looking like it is supposed to be part of a finished cabinet.

There are plenty of slower ways to do this with an iron, a trimmer, and a lot of cleanup. I have done all of them. This is much faster and gives me a really consistent edge from one part to the next.

It is not the flashiest part of cabinetmaking, but it is one of those shop upgrades that makes every cabinet coming out of the building better.

This was a fun one!

I filmed a little start-to-finish look at making a custom dovetail drawer in the shop. It starts with getting the parts surfaced, clean, and cut to width. Then I cut the dados and miters so everything lines up perfectly. After that, I biscuit the frame, glue the main box together, and start dialing in the joinery.

The dovetails are the best part. I used a homemade router jig to cut the mortises, glued the parts in, then cut and cleaned up the final fit by hand. It’s fussy work, but it’s worth it: strong joints and gorgeous craftsmanship.

Once the drawer was together, it got sanded, finished, sanded again, and finished again. The first coat of finish raises the grain quite a bit, so that second sanding is what makes it dead smooth.

I’m pretty stoked on how this one came out. Dovetails take time, but they make the whole piece stronger and just beautiful. Real craftsmanship is rare nowadays, and I’m proud to put boxes like this in my own kitchen and other people’s.