Book Review

I'm planning on building some cabinets. I took cabinet building in high school, so I have some limited experience with it. I don't have the shop that I had at my high school though, hopefully I can get a few more tools, and make do with what I have.

Building Traditional Kitchen Cabinets

by Jim Toplin

This book starts out with kitchen design, and weights all the different options out there. It shows ways of using modern materials to make cabinets that look traditional, or how to do it the traditional way. For example it shows a european style hinge that works with face frames. It weighs the pros and cons of using different woods, from solid wood to plywood to MDF. I haven't read it all yet, I've gone through it a few times, and it seems like a great book. We'll see what I think after the cabinets are built.

The Complete Illustrated Guide to Furniture & Cabinet Construction

by Andy Rae

This is like a coffee table book of furniture and cabinet concstruction. Lots of great photos, and every detail of furniture construction that you can possibly think of. It's not specific to cabinets, it's broken up in to different sections, like tables, chairs, et cetera. It shows how to build jigs to work around a lot of problems, and how to build stuff with a full shop, or just the basic tools.

We didn't get everything we wanted to done on the weekend, we did get a lot done though. We went to Jack's and found a 26" door for the bathroom. I think it was a closet or attic door, it's only 6'-4" high. It was only $25, and it's the right height for our low basement. It has this really cottagey looking hardware on it, I'll post a picture soon.
I framed another door in the basement, and Deb started stripping it. It's shellacked underneath, and it looks great. We saw the same doors at Jack's for $175, so I guess $25 was a good deal for these raised panel doors.
On sunday I finished tiling the floor in the bathroom, and started on the curb. There's not much left to tile. I have to have the cabinet in place before I can finish the final tiling. I also leveled part of the basement floor, I should say flattened, because the whole floor has a slight slope to it. I used a concrete topping, and worked pretty good. I know there are a lot more sections that could be levelled, I just can't spend the time and money doing it though.
I also bought the toilet and the heaters for the basement last night. We should have a working toilet and shower downstairs by the end of the week. It seems like I got more done, now that it's written down.