In the first part of this blog post, I covered the prep of the wood and cutting the rabbets and dados for the medicine cabinet build. This part will cover the adjustable storage shelves, assembly and installation.

Drilling Shelf Support Holes

To make the space a  usable as possible, I wanted to have adjustable shelves in the medicine cabinet. I considered a number of different mechanisms for this but, in the end, settled on using holes and brass pin supports. Making the holes for the support pins is pretty straight forward. The old trick of using peg board as a template works great.

Clamp it in place and start drilling with a 1/4″ bit. I can buy bags of the shelf pins from Lee Valley that are inexpensive and work well. For me, the holes in the peg board are actually too close together and so I only use every second one. Because the backside of the case will not be visible,  I was able to just drill through. If the back of your project is exposed and you are worried about breaking through, consider some sort of depth indicator for your drill bit.

Cutting the Shelves to Length

Making the shelves should be a straight forward as cutting to length and painting but, in reality, it was not so simple. One thing I neglected to mention earlier is that the closet opening that I am working to is not square.

This isn’t in any way unusual – just one of the everyday challenges that go with a century home. Most owners, including myself, prefer to call it character. In any case, the intention of the build was to make it look like it had always been there as part of the original house. As a result, I was forced to build the case out of square with the top being about 3/8″ wider than the bottom. As a consequence, to avoid having gaps at their ends, the shelves had to decrease in length from top to bottom.

Here are all the shelves laid out, before and after, for priming on my work bench.

After priming I marked the back of each shelf with Roman numerals from top to bottom. This ensured that I would be able to keep the shelves in the right order when they were installed.

Roman numerals were designed to allow a straight chisel to cut them so they are easy to execute. I also used the tang end of a triangular file to imprint an indicator of which side was up on each shelf. Not very pretty but are on the back which will not be visible when installed.

I gave them a couple coats of paint to finish them off.

Assembling the Case

With all the pieces ready, it was time to assemble the case. The case fit into the opening with a nice firm pressure fit. As I mentioned, the closet opening was not square. I first assembled the sides and shelves with nails and glue and pressed it into place while wet. I left the back off, however, to allow it to conform to the shape of the opening. The resulting frame was distorted exactly out of square in the same way that the opening was. Once removed from the opening, I fitted a piece of 1/4″ plywood into the rabbets at the back, taking into account adjustment for out of square.

I realized at this point that I had neglected to address the gap below the bottom shelf. A quick trip to the discards pile produced a piece of painted pine suitable for the job as a toe kick.

The whole thing then slide back in place with hardly a gap between the cabinet and the door stop of the closet opening.

Despite the slight out of square condition, the joints still looked pretty good.

Painting

Getting near the finish line, I just had to paint the case. A quick coat of primer followed by a couple finish coats did the trick. At this point, it looked pretty much like it had always been there. The only real give away was how clean and fresh the new paint looks – time will take care of that.

I should mention one of the minor, but painful hiccups in the process. As you can probably imagine, the multiple layers of paint affect the diameter of the shelf support holes. It was then impossible to insert any of the support pins into them. The back row of holes was also quite close to the back of the cabinet. This made it impossible to use a power drill to re-drill. I reamed out the holes using my hands and a 1/4″ bit. There are a lot of holes and drill bits have sharp edges. It is something I’ll have to rethink if I do this again. Perhaps paint the side panels ahead of time so I can ream them with a drill instead?

In the end, all is good and we’ve created usable storage space where none existed before.

Thanks for reading!

Part 1 of this build can be found here.

Older homes like ours (built in 1886) often present challenges around storage space as they often do not have the type or volume of storage space that are common in modern builds. Sometimes, even when space seems available, it can be an illusion. Take, for instance, one of the closets on our second floor in between the master bedroom and the girls room.

Looks great – access to storage just outside the door to two of the bedrooms! Unfortunately, when you open it up, you realize things aren’t quite what they seem.

It turns out that the space behind this door is only, at best, minimally useful. A previous owner had built a closet into the girls room by utilizing this space so it is not a complete loss from a storage point of view. The raw cedar that you can see in the pictures is the outside of the closet box from their room that cannibalizes the space from the original closet.

So, what to do? With only about 5 inches to play with from the surface of the cedar box to the front of the closet door stop, there weren’t a lot of options. Still, rather than write it off, I decided to utilize the space to make a large medicine cabinet. The shallow depth becomes a benefit as it makes it easy to see what is what when there are a lot of small bottles and boxes being stored there.

Prepping Stock

The first step was to prep some lumber for the job. I have a lot of pine boards laying around as the result of some significant work that I had to do in replacing balcony decking that the previous owner had installed inappropriately. I’m a huge fan of using reclaimed lumber so, rather than throw stuff out during demolition, I hang onto anything that may be useful.

While their condition certainly made it challenging to re-use them for anything stain grade, they were a fine option for the medicine cabinet, which would be painted. After a couple of hours of jointing, planing, and cutting to size, I had the stock ready to go.

If you wondering about the clamps, when I know that I won’t be assembling things right away, I like to clamp the stock to limit any warping. I’m not sure that it actually makes a difference but, in my mind at least, I feel better about it. To round things out, I did need to pick up a sheet of 1/4″ plywood at the box store. Again, no need for anything fancy as it would ultimately be painted.

Cutting Rabbets

The structure of the case is pretty simple. The top sits on rabbets with midpoint and bottom shelves sitting in dadoes in the side panels. The back would then fit into a 1/4″ rabbet cut into the back of the sides and top.

I start with cutting the sides to length.

A Tale of Two Rabbet Planes

The next step was to clamp the sides down and run the rabbet into their back edge. To do this, I pulled out my handy dandy Stanley 78. This is a straight blade rabbeting plane that just works. Worker examples like mine can be had for not much money from antique dealers or ebay. You can read more about them on Patrick Leach’s excellent website.

So it would seem that I have my game together – using reclaimed wood and reconditioned Stanley planes to keep costs down. However, I’ve not always been this conscientious and, in my past, have fallen prey to the siren song of the new, shinier offerings in this space. As a result, I also have a left and right pair of the excellent, though not cheap, Veritas skewed rabbet planes. With the 78 around, they have actually seen almost no use since I got them. However, running long rabbets in pine seemed like a perfect time to pull them out and get them into service.

As I said earlier, the Stanley 78 just works – full stop. The Veritas planes also just work, but even better than the 78, which is very high praise coming from me. Part of it is the better two post fence mechanism that keeps the plane square to the cut and part of it is the skew blade that pulls the plane into the fence as you cut. Of course, because we are talking about skew blades, this temporary infatuation will evaporate come sharpening time. The straight blade on the 78 is dead easy to put an edge on and not too fussy about being exactly square – I doubt it will be as painless with the Veritas.

Cutting Rabbets With the Grain

With the positive feeling still firmly in place, I started cutting my rabbets. The skew angle of the blade results in the most lovely spiral shavings that run the length of the board.

For those of you who are reading all this and thinking “why didn’t I just run the rabbet on my router table?”, you have clearly not used a good rabbet plane before. Setup takes only moments and with only a subtle noise, similar to the tearing of paper (no earplugs needed), the job is done. In the end, you have a perfect rabbet and only a pile of springy shavings to collect. No dust, no fuss, all good. The sense of satisfaction is palatable.

Cutting Rabbets Across the Grain

Cutting rabbets with the grain was so much fun, I thought I’d keep it up with the cross grain rabbet for the top. Turns out that while this works, it is not nearly as neat and clean. You need to use the nicker to sever the fibers as you are forming the rabbet. On hardwood, this works pretty well. Unfortunately, likely due to my particular technique, there seems to be just enough spring in softwood to make this not work nearly as well in pine.

With pine I find myself constantly re-cutting the cross grain edge by hand and so alternate between plane and knife (or chisel), which just slows things down. Hind site is 20/20. I should have done the cross grain rabbet with a saw and router plane as I did with the dadoes below.

Cutting the Dadoes

I like cutting dadoes. Not sure why but there is something satisfying in the outcome. Not sure my technique is the best but it work for me so here goes. First step is to cut the edges of the dado with my marking knife. I do this directly from the piece that will be fitted to the dado, the shelf in this case.

Next is to cut just inside the knife lines to depth with my giant back saw.

For those of you wondering why the back saw is so long, it is from a vintage Stanley miter box. Initially I found it hard to keep the saw square. I’ve got that in hand now and find the length of stroke I can take really speeds things up. It also makes judging the registration of the blade to the intended cut easier.

The next step is to hog the waste out with a sharp paring chisel.

Finally, I clean the dado up to finished depth using a router plane.

I use the Veritas version of the router plane. The vintage Stanley 71s work without question, but the depth adjustment is somewhat more of a pain than what is offered with the Veritas. Given that a new Veritas is not significantly different than what a good worker Stanley is going for, I erred on the side of ease. My opinion only, of course.

If everything is done correctly, the shelf should slip right in. Luckily that was the case here.

Next step, assembling the case and dealing with the shelves.

Part 2 of this build can be found here.