I received another commissioned project through one of my sister's coworkers. Kara recently bought a house, which was in need of some built-in shelving. To the left and right of her fireplace were two niches, each 2' deep and 4' wide.
I'm not sure how you could have made the space look right without adding built-ins. We went through a few designs, finally settling on a 3-door cabinet with shelving on top. I got to work building the bases and cabinets first. I carefully removed the old baseboards, knowing that I would want to reuse the back baseboard in front of the cabinets. I built the carcasses out of 3/4" pre-finished birch. I made the face frame and doors out of poplar.
I installed the bases and then made a template for the cabinet top. Being between 3 walls, it's best to make a template rather than measurements as the walls are never straight. Sometimes you take measurements only to find that the space isn't a perfect rectangle, but more like a rhombus. I knew this would happen from my experience installing stone countertops. However, I didn't heed my own advice when I measured for the shelves. I measures the walls at the cabinet height, but didn't think to get a ladder and measure the walls at the ceiling. I discovered this later when trying to install the shelves. The walls were not perfectly plumb and the opening at the bottom measured 47 7/8", but the opening at the top was more like 47 1/2." As I had borrowed my brother-in-law's truck and didn't want to have to make another trip, I ended up planing off 3/16" from both sides of the outer shelf walls...You live and you learn.
Anyway - the cabinets turned out well. I hate painting, so charged less than normal with the stipulation that Kara would do all the painting. She had paint left over from the newly built house and was able to match it to the existing trim. I think it looks much better now.
