Sharon's Cabinet

Every once in a while, I'll take on a project even though I have some mental reservations. This was one of those! Bob Zimmerman, the superb electrician who rewired the entire Grant St. Garage, asked if I would look at a cabinet that his wife Sharon bought at auction, for the princely sum of one dollar. He said, "I just want you to put a back on it."

Well, Bob has done a lot for me, including using his MIG welder to un-stick a seriously stuck bolt in the Z3 Coupe (link). I said OK, and decided I could make the cabinet better, at least. It was "rustic" at best, having lived in a barn for many years. We agreed that I would try to make it structurally sound and useable, while leaving the rustic exterior untouched. Bob said that they might put it in their kitchen as additional storage.



I didn't think to take a picture of the cabinet before I started, but that doesn't matter - I was really very careful to leave the "patina" intact. Here's a front and a side view, taken at the end of the project. The main difference at a glance is that you can see through the glass, since I cleaned years of grime off of it! You can also see new shelving, and you can't see through the back, which is actually a change.

Notice how the side looks like doors that should open also? That's because this wasn't a cabinet from a factory in this configuration - some long-ago craftsman took doors from another cabinet, and made the sides. It's more clear in this inside view - the doors are now nailed shut, with cleats nailed on the inside for the shelves. The interior of the cabinet was covered with crumbling wallpaper.

The face frame was repurposed from something else too - the rails are in mortises that are much too wide:

When purchased, the cabinet was hanging from the rafters of the barn by two large metal straps. Bob had to take the cabinet down after Sharon bought it. He asked that I remove the straps, which I did.

This interior view shows the tattered back, and the worse of the two drawers - notice that it doesn't have a bottom. The frame that the drawers should slide on was largely missing also, and the one remaining piece in the center was twisted and unusable. 

SO, the first order of business was to get the doors off, so I could re-glue them, and also to protect the glass from damage as I did other work. I could literally pull the door frames apart with my hands! But getting the screws out was impossible. The rusted heads, with shallow screwdriver slots, were stuck tight. I wound up drilling the first ones out. That's when I realized they weren't screws at all - they were nails with slots to look like screws. I had never seen anything like that before... I got all the nails out without damaging the hinges - even though the hinges were rusty, I wanted to reuse them.

With the doors off, I could repair a split stile (the vertical part of the frame) in the face frame:

I drilled out the spots where the hinge nails had been, and put in dowels so that I would have solid wood to use real screws to re-mount the doors:

Bob had said that he would clean up the paper inside the cabinet, but I realized the very best time to do it was while I had the doors and back off. Besides, it was a crumbly mess, and it smelled like a barn. I spent about an hour and a half scraping that stuff out.

That same day, Kelly Williams came by and we had a nice meal at Quip's Pub nearby. Afterwards, Kelly helped me control that floppy 8-foot sheet of lauan plywood for the back, cutting it to rough size on the table saw. Since the cabinet sides are bowed nearly a quarter-inch on each side, we had to further cut the back on the band saw to make it fit the curve.

Kelly also helped me build the new frame for the drawers to slide in:

I wanted to stain the back before mounting it, because access would be tough afterward. I found a stain called Minwax Jacobean that was a good color match on the lauan (right).

I re-glued the doors, taking care to keep them flat. Well, as flat as they were previously, anyway. One of them has a pretty good warp to it.

The reason the drawer pictured at the beginning was missing its bottom is that the sides had actually broken away, and were therefore too short. This picture makes that more clear:

After discussing it with Bob, I just made new drawer sides and backs for both drawers, along with new bottoms stained with the same Jacobean stain. I was careful to leave the drawer fronts in their rustic condition:

Since Bob wanted to use the cabinet in their kitchen, I vetoed re-use of the original shelves also. They were made from unfinished construction plywood, and were soaked with oil and who knows what else:

I cut new shelves out of pine material, and stained them in Bartley Honey stain. I finished them with satin polyurethane so they would be food-safe. The first picture shows them fitted in raw wood, and the second is during finishing. The screws you can see in the second picture are temporary - they allowed me to flip the piece and finish all sides at once, by suspending them from the screws.

And here's the finished product, complete with barn patina intact. It's now usable, and quite a conversation piece!