Working ahead - making kitchen cabinets

I get a lot of strange looks when I tell people I have already made the cabinets for the kitchen of the house that does not yet exist.  Questions are usually about how you can do that ahead of time without having the final space to measure.  Well, Knowing I would not have enough time to make cabinets after the house was built, I did a few things in the house design to help allow me to build ahead.  The biggest items were limiting fixed reference points and building in adjustability.  For example, the main wall cabinet run has only one fixed wall at one end that it butts against, so the other end was left free floating so it does not matter if things are off 1/4" or even 6" for that matter.  The 45 deg sink cabinet is shorter than the 45 deg wall and will use fill plates to make up the space with the cabinets next to it to allow adjustabiliy.  And the island is free floating, of course, so it has room to adjust as needed.

One thing to keep in mind as you look at these photos, is that these are only the "guts" of the cabinets.  I only made the structural boxes and drawer cases ahead of time.  This will all get covered with a continuous finished front after installation.  That part will be made to fit at that time.  SO... if you think these do not look all that great, the fact is they don't, and they shouldn't. This is all the hidden stuff, but it saved a ton of time to do it ahead of time.  Time I will not have when the rest of the house needs to be worked on.

I made these in batches that I could fit in my shop and finish all at once.  Here is one batch in finishing:

 I also made a large pull out drawer for the island that has a 4-bin recycling center.  Here is the drawer unit with bins. It goes into that large case that is 2nd from the right in the above photo.  It required some massive heavy drawer slides.

The island will have cabinets on the inside that are curved fronts. Most of the times I see curves done by just placing a few straight lines along a curve to approximate a curve.  The reason that is done is that curves are very time consuming to make.  Here are a few shots of the 2 cured front cabinets I made for the island

This is the glue-up form for the drawer front

Starting to clamp down the laminates I used.  These are glued up from several thin layers of resawn ash  to allow them to bend and conform.  Epoxy glue holds the layers together after curing.

Now you see what all the holes are for...

Finished product.  2 assymentric curved front cabinets that are symmetric when put together.  This took several weeks to make the parts, dovetail the drawers (very complicated on a curve) and glue-up.  Remember to click on these to get larger images to see details

In then end I completed probably 80% of the case work for the kitchen ahead of time.  There is more to do, including the finished fronts, of course, but this will save a lot of time during the house build.

That's about it for all of the prep work and background.  We've been working on this and planning for a number of years.  For example the cabinets were built over the space of 1.5-2 yrs, the land clearing took 2.5 yrs, and the prep work for building the large retaining wall was much of a summer and fall.

From here forward I will get into the actual house build that started in June 2013.  I am hoping to catch up on these posts so I can post brief updates with a couple pictures more frequently that don't take so much time to pull together.

Next post will be the start of the shop build!