Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Drydock pallet frame cabinet part 2

Browsing through my phone, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to make a blog post about the pallet frame cabinet completion last year.

We ended up having a bit of a tight deadline for the completion, since it was a wedding gift for Klaras friend. Furthermore I had to remain calm and pedagogical while trying to explain that: If you want the cabinet to be completed in time - well then you need to work on it. 

For some reason it was very hard to understand that you couldn't both go to the movies or go to a sauna all evening and at the same time work on the cabinet.  And that realization was really hard to fathom.

But after I had explained very clearly that the clock was ticking, and that I had spent hours helping, which was why I sort of expected some effort being put into completing the project, Klara saw what I meant and worked at it. 
Klara originally intended to paint the cabinet, but lack of time made this impossible. I told her that the recipient would no matter what be thrilled to receive a homemade cabinet, and that painting was one of the things that she could easily do at home without my tuition.
She also needed to decide on a closing mechanism (magnetic or latch type)

Lessons learnt:
For young people it is very hard to miss out on anything social in favour of a project that they have started themselves. So I should probably have advocated for a much less complicated project from the start. But I had been completely honest with the amount of time that it would take to build something like that, and also described how it could be achieved by a steady effort each day for maybe a couple of hours. But somehow the coupling between doing other stuff for 6 days and suddenly be short of time was not clear.

The actual build was helped a lot by the fact that we had a table saw at our disposal and also a thickness planer. 

Mouldings really help giving a finished look, as does a raised panel door.

It itched in my fingers to do part of the project myself, to speed up the process, but I managed to not do it, I wanted it to be her build, and I would only make sample joints so she could see how they should be carried out.



Klara planing a moulding.

The cabinet with the face frame on.

The completed cabinet with mouldings and a raised panel door.



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