Functional Design: Making Cabinets for the Shop

In 2023, the company that makes my CNC came out with a cabinet design and manufacturing application. I took this opportunity to completely revamp my shop.

Surface Finishes

At the time, my shop was a basic basement shop, with an unfinished ceiling, mediocre lighting, and poor storage. The new application gave me the push to renovate the shop from the top-down, starting with a flush-mount drop ceiling.

This included wrapping all the exposed beams and HVAC components with soffits, and reinstalling my LED-stick lighting to better make use of the new ceiling layout. All together, this improved lighting, cut down noise transfer to other floors, and just made the space more pleasant to be in.

I also rebuilt my lumber storage, as the previous setup wasn't a great experience, and now I could more easily look through the existing lumber and even provided a place to store and access full sheets of plywood behind the scrap cart.

Designing Storage

The next thing to tackle was figuring out how to cost-effectively get as much use out the space as I could. One are was pretty straight forward, across the back, as I already was using a hodgepodge of short shelving and temporary tables built for specific tools. I maximized this space by extending it as far as I could by pushing it right up to the new lumber storage area. The cabinets wrap around the side to provide a ton of counter space for the various sanders.

To make this as functional as possible, there's two lowered sections, one for the drill press, and one for the miter saw. The saw station gets adjusted to ensure it's perfectly flat with the final counter.

The second space receiving cabinets was the fireplace. Since this is the basement in a traditional colonial home, they added a fireplace in case the space was finished. I didn't want to remove the fireplace, but had no use for it. I came up with a design that would allow me to wrap the hearth and regain usability of that space.

I build the "toe kick" as a frame around the fireplace, then built up the cabinets above. The final design allows me to use the space as a standing desk, or sit with a tall stool I have to work on designs or other tasks while my laser or CNC is running.

For the work surface, I was referred to these amazingly affordable counters from IKEA, which come in a few finishes. The finish I chose has a subtle pattern in the surface, making it look a little like a granite, but most importantly they are durable and do a pretty good job of not getting glues and other liquids stuck to them.

Personal Touches

There were a few areas where I was able to personalize the cabinets. The first was pretty simple. I needed to bring the miter station up a few inches, so I inserted a board with my logo lasered into it.

Walnut Accents

The second place were the walnut handles I designed. It took some time to figure out how to produce these in volume, as I needed over 40 complete handles (some are split for paired doors), and I had a pretty clear vision. The idea was to band the top of every door and drawer with walnut, and have the walnut "pour" out into the room to become a handle.

The first step in manufacturing these was to design a layout for the CNC that let me carve the central part of the handle, as well as adding the curved relief on the back using a box bit.

The second stage was to use the router table to add in the face curve and the underside curve where your hand touches. Then there was a lot of sanding. After this, each handle was attached to the drawer faces and doors, and the sides were extended using walnut that I matched with grain and color.

Upper Cabinets & Fireplace Finishing Touches

The final steps were finishing above the cabinets. In the back, I added a row of upper cabinets for additional storage, which also hold a bunch of bins for the kinds of stuff that don't fit in a cabinet.

And above the fireplace, I enclosed the brick, and added a french cleat tool wall, completing turning a dead space (and tripping hazard) in my shop into a fully functional workspace that invites sitting down and making things.

The Living Workshop

This was a ton of work, and took me several months to complete. My relatively small shop is not built to manage the materials for 14 base cabinets, but with careful planning I could make sure that sections were finished and assembled right as they got installed.

As of writing this, there's still a lot of work to go, especially putting tools away and organizing drawers. I especially want to dig into Gridfinity organization for the drawers, now that I have a better 3D printer.

But that all makes sense, as a workshop is a living space. Things move and get adjusted as the work being done changes.