When designing a piece of furniture or a cabinet, the first thing you need to think about is the space it goes in. How large can it be? Or how small does it have to be to not interfere with the flow of the space? I think it helps to figure out the size of the piece first, then determine what style it should be in. My own personal style is a mix of craftsman and shaker, kind of the middle ground between the two styles really, with some modern considerations of course… why make wooden drawer slides when modern drawer slides are quieter and are even designed to allow wood movement?

After we’ve figured out the style then we can start determining the dimensions from the over all piece, how large should the drawers be? how large should the doors be, well when you draw it to scale you can extrapolate all this from your drawing. You can also catch a few of your mistakes and write down what you know you will forget in the design before you do it. You still need to double check your accuracy and so on but a rough idea will help you get started just the same.

The island I’m building has been a tad bit of a divergence from my typical designing style, since the customers mandated the size of the piece, I’ve had to do a good bit of backing up and re-thinking since the width of the top doesn’t allow for some of my typical design formulas. That said, building the undercarrage for this island before I even knew what the cabinet was going to be is a bit different for me, however it’s turning out to be the best approach, though an abnormal one for me. When I started to lay out the undercarrage, a former boss reminded me of greek designs and proportions because I radiused the corners of the butcher block top, I got reminded that a 3/4 overhang for the top was going to make it look less proportional, and be kinda like a “short fat girl” so I stopped and backed up.

The next challenge has had to do with my mortise and tenon joints. While my mind will tell me that I”m going to have a problem when I’m thinking three dimensionally, I don’t always know what that problem is going to be or how many there are. soooo I kept running into some challenges along the way, but hey it’s getting closer to completion, and I still have time to complete the piece before my deadline which is more because of christmas than a customer’s insistance that the piece be done.

So a few weeks back, I was walking through looking at a kitchen to bid it with an owner and the foreman overseeing his remodel. The foreman is his brother and my former boss/teacher. The foreman starts off with, we can do some open bookcases over here, and over here a cabinet over this laundry closet, and in the kitchen we can do some small cabinets above some big cabinets, and over here over the stove we can do some open shelves with radiused ends on them, and we can use heart pine, since there’s alot of that coming out of the house and laying around. Ok I say.

Little did I know that this barely mentioned over the stove open shelves would turn into one of the most intricate cabinets I’ve designed to date. And also probably one of the most time consuming I’ve ever built. Sure the open book cases that were mentioned wound up taking a week to build but they were solid wood and had to be sanded and resanded, stained, sealed then glazed… But what wasn’t discussed is that this stove is not an ordinary stove. It’s an old timey looking stove that is rather tall. 68 1/2 tall, so any open shelves now fall into the lower upper cabinets, right at the end of a very large archway entrance.

So I’m putting together all my uppers, and I look at this space. A space were open shelves are supposed to go. And I realize, this isn’t going to be as easy as open shelves with cleats or brackets on the wall. I was going to have to sit down, think this one out and draw it. Immediatly as I start drawing this piece with radiused ends little red flags start going off in my head.

“You don’t have any room here for cleats or for brackets, and even if you did, there’s nothing to support that outside corner floating over there in the air.” Great, I have to figure out how to hold those corners up, without a side on it.

“You know, you can’t use a 1/4 inch panel here like you had intended to, it just won’t support the load of the shelf.” Great, now I have to put in solid heart pine panels on the side, and probably the back, since there are no cleats or brackets.

“You know, this doesn’t land on a full wall, but a piece of casing on an archway, you can’t even drop a small side down.” Ok, we’ll wrap the shelves with a face frame.

“You know, there are radiuses on these shelves right?” Great, now I get to put radiused faceframes on the corner, this will be fun.

“You know, the reason for the shelves being radiused is because something needs to break up the squareness of the cabinets. But you have this flat facefrom.” Alright, I’ll put an arch one the ends….

On and on this line of thinking goes on til I have a really time consuming piece to build with a turned spindel with arched face frames killing into either side of it, and NOW that I’m two pieces from being able to sand and stain the thing…

“You know, this is awesome, but it’s almost kind of plain looking,” What, plain looking? Ok, so umm beads carving what???? lol And this is when I decide after taking some long looks at this cabinet, that it’s time to call it a night….