Our First Foray into Cabinet Building

My dad and step mom have a weird little nook in their living room

I'm sure the builders of this house intended for that to be the area where you put your TV, but it's just absurd. Who puts their TV on the far end of the room right in front of a doorway?

Because my parents have put their TV in place of the area where the fireplace used to be, this nook is really just floating in the room with no real purpose. So the idea was to build a cabinet into the space. Chris and I have done a lot of work to our house, but we've never built a cabinet. Chris has built me lots and lots of shelving units, but nothing with big chunky trim that fits perfectly into a space.

But we were prepared for the adventure.

We took a few trips out to my parent's house to take measurements, talk about design ideas and come up with a plan. There were lots of revisions

But we finally settled on a plan (click to make bigger)

The plan was to build a cabinet in 2 parts. Part 1 would be the bottom. It would be about 20 inches deep and have 3 adjustable wooden shelves (maybe 4). The "counter" would be at 42 inches up from the floor (the same height as the molding in the foyer - an adjoining room). The top of the cabinet would only be 13 inches deep and have 3 adjustable glass shelves (also maybe 4). There will be a recessed light at the top concealed by some nice arched trim (similar to other trim throughout the house) and it would all be painted white. We'll put some nice fluted trim on the sides of the cabinet which will tie into a lot of the doorways and other built in cabinets already existing in the house.

We spent a lot of time figuring out the trim. We visited an awesome mill in Oakland called White Brothers

They have a great sample area and let you take home 6" pieces to figure out what works best for you. We found an exact match for the "counter" trim, and the top molding is similar to other trim throughout the house

Taking 8 ft. trim home in my baby Ford Fiesta proved to be very interesting (I totally LOVE my new, more fuel efficient car. I traded in my Honda Element because I was spending a few hundred dollars a month in gas --> YUCK!)

Luckily the mill is close enough to home that I only had to take surface streets with trim hanging out my front window.

We tested out our new router table to get the right sizing and spacing on our fluted trim

And we painted sample trim with oil and water based paint to make sure we could get comparable coverage with the water based (we needed some sanding between coats) because the paint sprayer doesn't get along as well with the oil paint

We tested some poly to go on top to give it a nice, hard surface to hold up to lots of use.

And lastly, we did a lot of math to figure out all the crazy precise measurements we'd need to cut to construct this built in behemoth (about 47" wide and 82" tall)

We've just started the building process and making sure we went through all the prep work before to get everything mapped out has certainly made the process a lot easier. We hope to be done in another 2 weeks or so (pending any crazy discoveries). Look for an update soon!