A running build log from the shop.

I installed these pine fireplace built-ins on Friday. This was a good, fun job. I enjoyed figuring out how to make everything fit together and keep the finished work simple.

All the visible fronts are solid pine, stained to match the existing pine behind them. Stain matching can be a pain, and getting this one to belong in the room took some work.

The long shelves are plywood with solid pine stiffeners glued along both the front and back. They’re 50 inches long, but once installed they sat straight with no visible sag. There’s a lot of strength in a fairly minimal-looking shelf.

The fitting had to be precise. The plywood fit into the dados, and the solid wood didn’t, so everything needed to line up cleanly through the glue-ups. The only screws were used to attach the cabinets to the wall.

After the stain matching and careful fitting, it was satisfying to see it all come together. The install went great.

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.

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.