This was a quick and simple project for my kids ever growing toy collection. Didn’t want to spend a lot of time on something that would get abused to no end, so i went to Lowes and got some 3/4 oak ply and started cutting. Made a few drawers with some old school drawer slides and few hours later have a solid piece of furniture to store kids toys in. I designed it as two separate pieces that you can stack (located with a dowel pins) or separate them and move them around, back-to-back etc… Baskets with some frilly fabric from Target will go into the bays to help organize and give it more put together look. Stain was some old Minwax golden oak (everyone has a few cans of this i would imagine laying around, right) and a finish of General finish polyacrylic semi-gloss. Fast and cheap!

Built this about four years ago. It was made primarily out of MDF that I veneer with Mahogany. An experiment with veneering if you will. Finish was a water-based General Finish dark mahogany stain with a finish of gloss (which i regret now) water-based poly.

The sides and drawer front are all veneered and the drawers are 1/2” baltic birch ply. The top is a piece of MDF veneered framed (45) with solid mahogany to allow an edge to be ran. I did a french dovetail on the drawer front and standard english dovetails on the rear, which after about 4 years has been rock solid with kids using it ever day which if you have kids means a lot! I was worried in the beginning that the MDF might fail after repeated use but with this style of jointing it turned out pretty well.

Gave a shot at using Maple with a water based GF dark cherry stain. Definitely not easy when you mix with water and maple, but got through it. The key is sanding and sealer and spraying the stain to give you time to get it uniform! Cabinets cases and shelves are made out of 3/4 Maple Plywood with the doors, shelf face frames, and a two piece crown in solid maple. A piece of granite topped the lower cases as well as a lower more ergonomic desk height, and some custom LED lighting turned out to be a good final touch. I used General Finishes polyacrylic Semi gloss and their water based dark cherry stain all sprayed with my HVLP. Cant imagine life without that thing!

So a quick project for the wife! Thought I would try something a little contemporary as far as the design, even tried my hand at inlaying some purple heart. Used some hard curly maple. To pop the grain I used a water/transtint dye with a 150 grit sanding in between two coats to get the right color and absorption, then some GF Seal a Cell and finally 3 top coats of GF Arm a seal.

Criticism welcome!

We’ll after 300 Hours, 3 months, and $6000…. I’m finally done with my kitchen renovation. I’ve been meaning to post on lumberjocks for sometime just never got around to it, thought this would be a good one to start! After living in my house for a couple of years I was tired of my wife complaining about the kitchen cabinets and how inefficient and impractical they were, so I took action and built her, from scratch, a complete custom kitchen. Looking back on it… probably won’t do something this big again (partly because I have a full time job (Mech. Engineer) and two kids) but now that it’s over it feels pretty good to have been a cabinet maker, demo guy, plumber, electrician, dry wall guy, painter, and finally the clean up guy! I’m a diehard DIY’er, so I did it all (other than installing the granite, very very heavy).

So the details, started out with a load of 3/4 Baltic birch ply (non-prefinished, first mistake! I’m cheap and times are tough, right? ), 74 board feet of cherry, and a few sheets of 5.2mm (1/4 ply) for doors. The design is frameless; I found that this type of cabinet design, for me, will allow the most access and space vs. face frame designs. Total of 15 cabinets, 26 doors, and 7 drawers. The doors are standard panel doors stained with GF’s warm cherry oil base stain, with 3 coats of gloss General Finishes Water base (GF WB) polyacrylic, then a final GF WB Satin coat. I tell everyone I was going for a more contemporary look when they ask why there not raised panel, just too expensive, and a load more work. The base cabinets are your standard frameless boxes, I edge banded with cherry, stained, and then shot (HVLP) the whole cabinet with gloss GF WB acrylic. Holding up pretty well. I did a few custom features like a pull out trash can, double pull out pot/pan drawer, 36 diameter double lazy susan, and added a few more drawers than the originals (2 moderately useless and 2 completely useless drawers, old kitchen picture is attached.. The white one!). The 7 drawers are solid cherry, and the boxes are made out of 1/2 baltic birch dovetailed on all four corners, an excessive use of my dovetail machine. I installed LED under cabinet lighting. To accommodate the lights, I did some under cabinet molding which really dressed it up. I also did a 2 1/2 inch crown on the top. Out of the whole project this was probably the most pain, I had to rip out the original bulk head which was probably the most work when I look back, demo and drywall (I hate this kind of work). However by ripping this out gave me great access to put in new recessed lighting. To top it off, I got a exotic Grade E slab of granite for a good deal, had a full ogee on the edges and a under mount sink cut out and installed to finish it off. Critics welcome. Jason