Custom Cabinets

Elizabeth here from EMMS. I want to share with you one of the projects that Mark and I did together using all the equipment in our Wood Shop—floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall custom cabinets in our home. To pique your interest, here is a photo of the final product.

We started off with four main carcass pieces first, to build the base of the cabinets and drawers themselves. Even dividing the cabinets up, the individual carcass segments were still big—6’5″ x 4’5″ x 32″ for the two biggest ones. Luckily, we were able to bribe friends with dinner to help us move those bad boys from the garage (the predecessor of our Wood Shop) into the house.

Once we had the carcasses built and face frames added, it was time to start making drawers and cabinet doors. As I was to learn, whenever I thought I could get X done in a weekend, what ended up happening was making a jig for X first. Drawers are a perfect example. Here, we leveraged not only the Wood Shop, but also Mark’s machining expertise to make a custom base for the router that allowed us to precisely place and tune the drawer-locking bit. The jig sure was worth the delay, though—just look at that amazing fit at the drawer corner!

I was in charge of the design, measuring each piece of our gear to see what size drawer would be needed to house it. Below are some of my favorite specialty drawers. First we have the massive backpack drawer, that contains our day packs (in the front, where you can see), and our backcountry packs for backpacking trips (behind the day packs). Next is our climbing gear drawer, including a full rack of trad cams and nuts. Then we have the sleeping bag drawer that comes with a lid, so the bags can mostly fluff out (it’s not good to store them long-term in their stuff sacks) but still be contained to a finite volume. Lastly, we have three “shelf drawers” that pull out like a drawer but present shelves on one side; these are indispensable to be able to access things waaaaaaay in the back of the nearly 3-ft. deep cabinets.

Our other pride and joy of the cabinets is the combined work table + murphy bed. While the rest of the cabinets were 100% custom designed, engineered and fabricated, we started with instructions and hydraulic springs for the bed purchased from Create-A-Bed, which we highly recommend. The instructions were easy to follow and the customer service was fantastic.

Starting from their base plans, we added a 4′ x 4′ table that folds down from the front. I made the front leg of the table by inlaying a mosaic of tiles, a gift from my sister, that form a tableau of a lily pond (an homage to another passion of mine—water gardening). The subtle springs part of the original kit hold the bed itself upright, but I added dried cholla, reinforced with epoxy, to latch the table up.

The bed itself is pulled down with two handles made from a retired climbing rope. The headboard and horizontal brace above it were modified from the original, straight design to have a distinctly New Mexican motif. We also added the small storage shelf above the bed, customized to fit the height of the room.

The quilt on the bed is another, more recent pride of mine. Check out my post to get the full story: Blue Willow Quilt. I made the mistake one day of admiring the colors of some fabric my mother—a prolific and expert quilter—had in her sewing room. Before I could blink, she had the whole project packaged in zip lock bags and handed off to me to finish. All credit to her for picking out the fabric and cutting 2″ strips, and then I pieced it and hand-quilted it from there. This quilt is one example of a project you could do in our future Fabric Shop.

I hope this post gave you a sense of at least one type of project you could do yourself at EMMS, with the equipment in the Wood Shop and the expertise we offer through our classes. If you’re inspired, drop us a line—we’d love to hear from you!