It’s been an interesting week.

I started off by quickly making three cabinets to put in my extended kitchen, which is a project that never has and probably never will complete itself. That, I would like to say, went well enough … except it didn’t. In my never-ending desire to get the greatest economy out of my materials, I made the cabinets too long (oh, I can make it 28 inches wide since this piece I’m using is 29 inches long). You don’t have things like that happen if you take your time and measure everything, draw everything, then go according to plan.

Instead, it took about two hours to make three cabinets that ended up an inch too long. They still fit, they just interfere with some window trim.
Nothing a chisel can’t fix.

And, sometime after that, I decided it was time to clean up the workshop, since I’ve been making quite a mess in there. The radial arm saw really doesn’t help that situation. It blows sawdust everywhere when I use it. But it’s just so much fun to use…. Anyway, my attempt to clean up lasted approximately three minutes and ended with me making a box.

What’s the box for? I don’t know.

So, I had one door to make for a cabinet I’ve been trying to finish. And I had six doors to make for the recent cabinets I made. The single door, I made from plywood and poplar. The six doors, I decided to make as frame-and-panel using half-inch mdf for the frame and eighth-inch hdf for the panel. I was going to just make mdf rectangles as slab cabinet doors, but I thought, hey, I can use less expensive material if I just make panel doors.

Great idea.

First, way more cutting. Each door has 5 parts. But cutting is the fun part.

Second, there are joints to glue. That’s not too bad. That went well.

Then, there is sanding. That’s more irritating, since there are lots of edges. But that didn’t take too long.

Then, priming. Don’t believe it when the can of paint says “paint and primer all in one.” It’s lying. You will waste money using your final coat paint as primer. I used actual primer, which should be significantly less expensive, but not this stuff. The truly less-expensive primer seems to be heavily watered down drywall compound. Anyway, priming with a brush went … slowly.

Then more sanding. Then more painting.

Finally, there was then the true and unmatched irritation of discovering that four of six doors were actually too narrow. Somewhere in my scrawled pencil scratch mathematics I dropped an inch from the equation. Or, I did it while measuring. Or, I stupidly went off my original scrawls for the cabinet dimensions, which I extended when I saw I had enough material to make them bigger.

Anyway, now I have two more cabinets to make, because those doors will be used.

But unfortunately, I also have four more doors to make.