An Unintentional Hickory Cabinet

Have you ever started a project thinking you were building one thing and by the time you are done you wind up with something completely different?

I started this project about 4 years ago while I was living in Lima, OH. We had a built in workstation in our kitchen which contained a set of open shelves, and one day the LOML tells me she thinks it would look neater if those shelves were closed in. Can I build a set of doors to match the rest of the kitchen and cover up those shelves? Sure, how hard can it be right? Oh, did I mention the rest of the kitchen was Hickory?

So off I go to the local sawmill in search of some Hickory. Lo and behold they show me a pile of hickory they have stashed away in the attic of an outbuilding that contains some boards that are some 13” wide. Hooray! I have found just the right boards for my doors. I scoop up a few of the boards and proceed to make these two raised panel doors which are sized just right for the bookcase and match the yellowish stain of the rest of the kitchen.

Well before I can finish the project and get them installed on the bookcase, I find out that the company I work for is transferring me to Cincinnati, OH, and of course in the whirlwind of activity that follows I never did get those doors installed and the movers packed them up with the rest of my shop.

Time marches on and with my attention diverted to setting up a new shop and doing several projects around the new house, the doors just sat in a corner without me having any inkling what to do with them.

My wife is an avid scrapbooker, and one day she comes into the shop, notices those doors sitting there, and politely suggests that they would look awfully nice if they had a cabinet built around them that could house her growing collection of scrapbooking albums. How can I refuse?

The resulting cabinet (55”H x 43”W x 18” D) fits perfectly into a niche in her studio and was the result of a collaborative design effort with LOML developed around the existing set of doors. I managed to cut the cabinet sides, top and shelves from one sheet of 3/4” Hickory plywood, while the face frame, base and drawer fronts are solid Hickory. The drawers are poplar, and are joined with handcut dovetails. This is the first time that I attempted a 2 piece solid crown moulding and I was very pleased with the way it turned out.

So what started out as a just a set of doors, morphed in a totally unexpected way into something I could not have possibly anticipated when I started.

Thanks for looking!

-- When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt! Henry J. Kaiser