Truncated weekend again due to Friday's in town activities. Still I got a bit more done on the cabinets, despite Saturday being taken up entirely with miscellaneous stuff that I have a hard time tracking after the fact.

Some of these photos are from last weekend.

Where I left off last, I had ripped the panels down to roughly 16" wide by 8' strips.  Next I cut them to the correct length for the cabinet sides.  I chose a total height of 83-1/2", as this is the floor to ceiling distance at the outside walls of my mobile home.  I don't intend to put them there initially, but I may move them in the future and want them to fit anywhere I move them to.

As I did when ripping them, I measured carefully and clamped a guide board to run the saw along to ensure a straight cut.


While the cuts are straight this way, the circular saw blade does not cut as smoothly as my table saw does.  I next cut the sides to 15-1/4" wide on the table saw, to allow room for the doors (3/4" thick) to make the whole unit 16" wide when done.


The table saw makes very smooth, clean cuts. This will be the front edge of the sides.


The top of the unit was trimmed up to be a full 16" deep by 32" wide, as the doors will close underneath the top.  This is the bottom shelf (15-1/4" wide, same as the sides, together with a 3-1/2" kick board glued, clamped and screwed onto it.


The shelves were trimmed to be 15" wide by 30-1/2" long, which makes them 1/4" narrower than the sides and twice the thickness of the sides shorter than the top (to fit inside the unit).  The 1/4" width offset will be at the front of the shelves, so that the door will close 1/4" in front of the shelves.  Call me cautious, but I didn't want the shelves to interfere in any way with the doors. The extra 3/4" of plywood trimmed from the front of each shelf is turned over and glued and screwed to the bottom edge of the shelf to reinforce it against warping under load.


Here is the top, sides and bottom shelf assembled, together with the top shelf.


Another 3/4" square strip is glued and screwed to the sides at each shelf to help support the load on the shelf. I'm using polyurethane moisture cured glue for this project, as I do with nearly any wood construction these days. It's great stuff! One of the recognizable name brands of this is called "Gorilla Glue".


Completed shelf installation, viewed from what will be the back of the unit.


Shelves installed and 1/4" plywood back panel installed. I will fill in rough spots, screws and holes with painter's caulk before painting, then will install the doors and hardware.

The large space on the bottom of this unit is designed to hold four stacked five-gallon buckets.  Another shelf could easily be installed there, and on the other two units I intend to add another.

I thought about making more detailed sketches of part sizes and a part cutting guide, to make this sort of an Instructable. I may yet do this before I'm done with all three cabinets, but no promises.

I can't recall if I mentioned, but this is only intended to be utility grade.  Doing this up to furniture standards would require better quality wood and much more anal-retentive attention to precise cutting and finishing.  The final finish will be the gloss black paint I showed on one piece a couple weekends ago, and it will look just dandy. 

As usual (!!) I grossly underestimated the time this little side trip of a project would take me.  *sigh*

Oh and regarding skunks, last night was a twofer.  I set three traps and two of them had skunks in the morning.  This makes three this fall.  Something tells me there may be more.  There were a *lot* of tracks last weekend when I failed to catch any of them.  The li'l buggers seem to have recovered from my eradication efforts a couple years ago.  Such is life in the valley.