Making it look original
Our youngest son bought a 1930's bungalow with a fireplace that just screamed for cabinets so I decided to build a pair with his help. In this blog I will take you through the process, the time it took and how much I spent in building and installing the cabinets as well as the mistakes I made along the way.
Planning the project
The project started with deciding what the finished project should look like. I thought that glass doored cabinets with shelves were the most appropriate for their home. They had electronics they wanted to hide and objects they wanted to display. Also, I thought the mantel should extend all the way to the wall on both sides of the fireplace. Our son also said "can you fit in a hidden compartment?". The hardest part of project was figuring out how could I match the stain color of the mantel that had 80+ years of wear and aging.
A couple of important questions at this point is how long will this take and how much is it going to cost? Here is what it took me: 107 hours with some additional time and effort from my son and it cost $215 for the wood, $119 for hardware and $148 for finishing materials for a total of $482.
Here is what the room looked like in the beginning.
Although I took my own measurements some weeks before, I asked my son, who lives 45 minutes away incidentally, to measure again and send me drawings I could begin to work from. Here is what he sent me.
From these drawings I developed a drawing of a cabinet that would fit on either side and whose top would be at the bottom of the cabinet. I would then build a hollow mantel piece to fit on top of the cabinet so it would extend to the wall. Note that the side frames around the door are the same distance as the overhang of the mantel over the fireplace side
Picking out the right materials
One of the first things I did was to decide what wood I would use to build the cabinets. I ended up choosing poplar for several reasons. It is a relatively less expensive hardwood that is easy to mill and work with and is available at big box stores. However, one draw back of poplar that I will address later in the post is the difficulty in staining poplar because of its green/gray streaks. It does require a more complicated layered staining to get the desired color.
In this case I bought 3 sheets of cabinet grade 3/4" plywood at Menards and poplar lumber at one of my favorite local cabinet hardwood stores even though I could have bought it at Menards, Home Depot or Lowes. They had a larger selection to pick from and I could get a better price when I buy large quantities. You can see from this chicken scratch of a drawing that I figured out the cutting list for the plywood before making the purchase to make sure I had enough material.
The cabinets consist of two boxes, one for the body of the cabinet and one for the top of the cabinet that matches the mantel, and a frame with a door in it. Our son Nick was interested in helping to build it so I wanted to take the opportunity for him to learn how to use some of the tools and techniques. Since the cabinet box and shelves were all plywood, we set on the task of cutting all of the pieces to their final width and length that I had determined from the measured drawings.
Since all of the joints of the box were going to be hidden, I decided to put the box together with pocket screws.
The result was that we had a collection of boards with the pocket screw holes on the outside of the plywood with the finished poplar veneer on the inside.
To lessen the need for full thickness plywood and the weight, I decided to make the back a frame and panel using poplar rails and stiles and 1/4" plywood panel. I joined the rails and stiles with dominos.
Once we had the plywood sides, top, bottom and back panels prepared, we applied the finish to those pieces before assembly. As I said earlier, poplar can be tricky to stain because of its streaks of green color and the tendency of the light areas to blotch. I used a technique described in Popular Woodworking. After sanding the wood to 180 grit:
Apply a stain controller made by mixing one part General Finishes Clear Gel Varnish with 3 parts mineral spirits
Apply with a rag and wipe off any excess in 5 minutes
Apply TransFast Medium Brown water based dye with a rag and wipe off any excess. Allow the wood to dry 2 hours
Apply a coat of General Finishes Candelite Gel stain and let dry over night.
Apply 2 coats of amber shellac.
Apply one coat of polyurethane.
The result was a very close match to their mantel and trim.
At this point, I sent all of the plywood pieces and cabinet backs home with Nick to sand and apply the layered stain to all of the interior surfaces. He lives 45 minutes away, so it was not a good use of time to have him come to my shop to do this step. During the next few shop sessions, I applied a poplar edge to all of the plywood shelves to cover the edge of the plywood and give the shelves greater strength so they would not bow when holding heavy objects. I glued the edging on using the biscuit cutter to align them with the upper surface of the shelves. I then sent the shelves home with Nick to sand and stain.
Next, I tackled the face frames and doors for the cabinet. In this situation, I built the face frames first so that the side stiles were the same width as the mantle overhang (6") so that the doors would be centered between the fireplace and the wall. The top rail is 3" wide and the bottom one 5" wide to match the height of the baseboards. The face frames were joined with 6 mm dominos. I designed the doors 6 mm shorter and thinner so that there would be a 3 mm gap all around the doors. The 35 mm hinges I use, require the 3 mm gap for inset doors.
The tricky part of building the doors was putting in the grid and leaving enough room for the single pane of glass behind the grid. The door rails and stiles are 3/4" thick so I made the grid 1/2" thick and 30 mm wide. The grid consists of 2 long pieces and 9 short pieces.
Prior to assembling the door, I cut 4 mm domino slots in the rails and stiles as well as 8 mm domino slots to join the rail and stile corners.
I dry fit the joints and routed a 1/4" x 1/4" rabbit to fit the glass. If you look carefully, you can see the 4 mm domino slots on the top rail and left stile. I then squared up the corners with a chisel so that glass would fit. You can have the corners of the glass rounded to fit but that adds unnecessary cost.
The glue up required specific sequence to get all of the pieces to fit the door frame. I first glued up all of the grid pieces, then the top and bottom rails and the side stiles last.
I then did a test fit into the face frame and it fit!
By the way, the horizontal grid pieces were placed so that they would be at the level of the shelves. Unfortunately I decided to put the middle hinge in line with the middle shelf forgetting that 35 mm inset hinges require significant space to work. I did not discover the mistake until we were hanging the finished doors on site. The other hinges were mounted at the middle of the door corners and were capable of holding the weight of the door.
The remaining work on the face frames was to cut holes for outlets on the wall side stiles so that we could give access to the wall outlet that was going to be covered by the cabinets. Because this house did not have grounded wiring, I added a ground fault outlet inside the cabinet for electronics and then wired the face frame outlet to the ground fault outlet.
The next task was to build the mantel extension with a hidden compartment.
I first built two boxes the height of the mantel. Note that I drilled holes in the top and bottom of boxes to pass wiring through. I then made a front panel in three sections with bead edging on the outside pieces.
I then put magnets on the face of the box edges and on the back of the middle piece. The mantle pieces
Next, it was time to apply the finish coats on all of the pieces prior to assembly. Nick had sanded and stained the shelves and the shell of the cabinet and I had done the same with the face frames and doors. We cabinet pieces spread out all over the shop and I sprayed on two coats of satin water based polyurethane on all of the pieces. This took two days.
We then assembled the cabinet by joining the cabinet top, bottom, sides and shelves with pocket screws on the outside. However, when we went to put the back on, I discovered I had made a serious error in calculating the width of the back panel.
Each cabinet back was 2" too narrow. I fixed the problem by making a narrow strip to fill the gap.
The next step was installation of the cabinets and doors. I first installed the cabinets in the space, hung the doors and installed the outlets. They fit nearly perfectly. I installed beaded trim pieced on the fireplace and wall sides to cover any gaps.
I then added the mantel extensions with hidden compartment.
I have a few little details to finish on this project, but it is essentially complete.
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