It all started when someone who was interested in buying some of my paintings came to the house. We use our computers in the living room, and had been using some very functional, very baby-proofable, very ugly white cabinets to contain them. I knew they were ugly, but I was able to edit them out of my vision most of the time. At this moment though, when I was showing my paintings to a potential buyer, I realized that this was just not good marketing. Who is going to want to buy paintings from someone with cheesy taste like this? It turned out that my potential buyer was kind enough to overlook the ugly cabinets—I’ll make sure to post the paintings that I made for her. She did have to wait a little longer than usual to get her paintings though, because I thought that I would just quickly whip up this cabinet and then get on with my other work.
I really didn’t want to take on a woodworking project, I just wasn’t able to find anything suitable to purchase. I made a thorough search, and just came up with nothing. The only thing that made sense was to order some custom kitchen cabinetry and modify it to work. Then the very naive thought came to me…”Well, I’ll just make it”.
“We’ll, I’ll just make it”, always turns out fine for me even when I don’t have a clue what I’m doing—which I didn’t in this case. I’m a master of winging-it and I also work very fast, so I have never regretted taking on projects like this.
Building cabinets is not difficult. Because of all of the right angles, it is much simpler than sewing. But I must warn all of the seamstresses out there, that cabinet making just…takes…a…l..o..n..g…time.
Had I known how long I would need to spend on Stupid Cabinet, I would have saved myself a lot of frustration. Instead I thought, “Oh, I’ll just whip up the cabinets this month and then get back to work”. And then I said, “Oh, I have the carcasses done, so now it’s almost done. I just have to build the doors, sand, and stain it!” And I just kept saying, “Oh, I have that part done. Almost finished!”. And then I was waking up early to work before the kids got up, and staying up late to work when the kids went to bed, and working on the weekends while my poor husband watched the kids. That is how Stupid Cabinet got its name—I started saying “I need to go work on that stupid cabinet”.
Stupid Cabinet was completed at the end of the summer, and I eventually caught up on my backlog of work. I’ll eventually think up some beautiful thing to insert in the cabinet doors, but for now it’s kind of convenient to be able to just reach into the cabinet without opening the doors. Our kids are old enough now that we no longer have to worry about them inserting sandwiches in the disk drives…knock on wood.
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3 comments:
:-)
So ..that was the reason behind you being so quite....
The SC does look good though...well done ;-)
With sewing if I just want to make something, I just make it. No pattern? No problem. Not the same with wood I guess. Well anyway it looks great! I always wonder about just making a bookcase. Maybe not then.
Hi Jen,
Don't let me discourage you. I didn't use a plan for this project--just made a few measurements. If you can sew without a pattern, you can definitely do this--just take care of your fingers. You'll need them for sewing!
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