I didn't grow up in the woodworking business. I came into the woodworking business from being a small business consultant. That has given me a different perspective, a perspective of seeing things for the first time, dramatically rather than through a slowly evolving process.
Although I always had an affinity for fine woodwork, I didn't really know what makes custom woodwork special. I have learned that lesson and I am still saying, Wow!
So what makes the difference between custom woodworking on the high end and stock cabinets you can buy in the home improvement store? It's a lot to explain in a single installment, so I will break it up into easily digestible bites.
When I see woodwork in a home, restaurant, or office one of the first things I look for are seams. With custom woodworking you will typically see very few seams if any. With stock cabinets it is unavoidable. Why? The ability to assemble a kitchen to your taste from a selection of different cabinets with different functions necessitates that each cabinet is a single entity. This is also how they can keep the cost down by mass production. If you are manufacturing 1,000 36" wide sink base cabinets with two doors out of oak, a lot of the costs of making one cabinet such as the design and the layout can be spread over 1,000 units which goes from tens to hundreds of dollars for a custom cabinet to a few dollars to pennies on a run of 1,000. Also if you are making that many cabinets it pays to do it overseas and ship it back by the container load.
When we build cabinets for a room we try to combine a run of cabinets into a single unit limited only by what will fit through the door and down the hallway, into the elevator, etc. and how much a gang of burly guys can lift. It is not uncommon for us to arrive at a job site and unpack the cabinets while they are still in the truck, removing the drawers and doors just to make it lighter to carry and even with that we use dollies to roll them whenever we can. When we do that it minimizes, if not eliminates the seams. When there are seams we make them as minimal as possible and then after installation we touch them up to try to make them even more inconspicuous if not disappear entirely.
The whole process of engineering the cabinets prior to manufacturing is focused on where we can join the pieces of wood while hiding the joints and the fasteners that hold them together.
One place in particular to look is where two wide pieces meet at a corner. We use techniques such that it will appear as if it is one continuous solid piece of wood, where in reality it is most likely two panels. A long joint like that is very difficult to line up and miter in the field from individual pieces, so most stock cabinets will have an overlapping joint where one panel overlaps the end of the intersecting panel, with a long seam.
A technique that is used to disguise the seams that I see in more kitchens today is having adjacent cabinets at different depths so that a seam is unavoidable. For example, if you had a row of upper kitchen cabinets the first cabinet on one end might be 24" deep. Next to it will be another cabinet set back at, say, 12" deep. Next to that will be a range hood that bumps out to 24" again and the pattern repeats on the opposite side, in to 12" out to 24". By utilizing this in, out, in pattern the seams are necessary and therefore are not as obvious.
Next time I'll tell you about size.
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