Furniture Design: An Office Cabinet for a Maker Space

August 12, 2025 Phil DeJarnett

Recently I upgraded my 3D Printer to a Bambu X1C, which was an amazing change from the more basic printer I had for years. 3D Printing quickly shifted from a tedious hands-on process to simply sending prints to a tool. I immediately went on a materials shopping spree, adding many rolls of filament of different colors to my collection.

The new printer includes the AMS, which allows for multi-color prints, and much easier loading and unloading of filament. The only thing I found tedious with the new setup was finding filament and swapping it in-and-out of the zippered bags I used to keep it dry. So I set out to resolve that in a practical way, and ended up with a piece of furniture that is specialized, built to last, and still has a design that feels timeless.

Designing for Purpose

When designing a piece of furniture like this, it's important to outline the purpose and needs of the item first. The most important aspect was storing filament, but I also wanted to support a few other office-based use cases and hobbies.

Filament Storage

In looking for a cost-effective solution for storing filament, I found these cheap plastic tubs that almost perfectly held 5 standard rolls of filament. They weren't air-tight, but I could easily add some weather-stripping, toss in some desiccant, and they were a pretty decent, easy solution to storing filament. They are roughly 9" high, with a footprint of 11"x16". Using this as a baseline, I checked the rest of the items I wanted to store.

3D Printer Supplies

There's a variety of items that go along with the filament for the 3D printer, including tools, replacement parts, and other supplies. I wanted as much of this as practical in the same cabinet.

Laser Printer/Copier

The laser printer all-in-one would also sit on this cabinet, and I wanted easy storage of the supplies for that. This included a variety of paper products, my rotary paper cutter, and miscellaneous office supplies.

Vinyl Cutter

Finally, the last big piece was my vinyl cutter, which has a lot of 12" square stock for cutting, rolled stock for cutting, and tools for weeding and applying vinyl. I needed to make sure to include room for this to help improve my workspace.

Cabinet Design

Before getting into software, I did some basic sketches to figure out the required dimensions. I quickly realized this would be a big cabinet, as I needed 18" in width and a full 24" deep to get two bins in a drawer. I settled on a design that had equal spacing for each vertical section, 4 sections in all.

I used Illustrator for designing the elevation and profile of the cabinet. This allowed me to iterate on the spacing of drawers, leg design, and work on some other details. I also used cabinet making software to help me think about the cabinet's structure. While I didn't use the cabinet software for the final design in this case, it helped me resolve some spacing issues.

Materials & Finishes

I have dark cabinets in my office, and dark acacia flooring. I wanted something that would complement the colors without standing out too much. I also just really like black walnut, so I went with that. I also really wanted a large, continuous-grain panel across the front.

I originally ordered matte black handles, because I had intended on adding engraved design accents to the face. When I realized the walnut I had on hand was so figured (more on that later), I decided to go with a matte aluminum finish. I know that brass is in, but I preferred the silver tone here.

The work surface was a different matter. While it would have been nice to have a solid wood top, I wanted something that could take abuse a little better, since this is a workspace. I went with an inexpensive option I've used in my shop, a pre-made countertop from IKEA. It's cheaper than anything I can make myself, and handles basic abuse relatively well.

Finally, for the drawers and inner box, I went with pre-finished birch plywood to save on time. After making my shop cabinets, I wanted to avoid the time-sink in hand-finishing drawers and spaces that aren't really seen much.

The Build

Once I had a design, it was time to start building the cabinet. Not all of this design was figured out perfectly beforehand, but I had enough to start working to figure out where I needed to go.

Inner Cabinet Box

I started with a basic cabinet design, not too dissimilar from a kitchen cabinet. Having built plenty of these before, I was familiar with the process. The difference this time is I modified the multiple-box design I used for the shop cabinets, I wanted to reuse the vertical partitions to keep the final size down. The box components were cut out on my CNC, and assembled with glue and screws.

I also cut out the drawer components on the CNC, using a design I've used in the past. There are 14 drawers in total, with 5 unique designs:

4 pencil drawers across the top
2 small drawers on the sides
2 medium drawers on the sides
2 deep drawers on the sides
4 extra-deep drawers for the filament boxes

All told it adds up to a lot of parts to keep track of! This photos is from earlier in the process, but I also added birch veneers to the top edge of the drawers to hide the plys.

Main Box Exterior

First, to hide the birch plywood when the drawers are closed, I edge-banded the plywood with walnut veneer. It's a small effect, but helps with the finish quality.

The next part was the trickiest and required several parts to be built and fit simultaneously. I wanted the final design to have equal-width drawer faces, continuous grain, and I wanted the drawers to be wrapped in a reverse-beveled molding. The first step here was to glue up the face panel, which was a single large 6' x 2' panel. I did my best to match the grain on the individual pieces to help make the panel feel like a single piece of wood. I also wanted to ensure I highlighted some of the more interesting pieces.

While this was curing, I began work on the sides. To break up the flat surfaces (and save on both material & weight), I made the sides using shaker-style rails & stiles. The centers are book-matched, which means I split the boards in half, and opened the split like a book.

The design of the ends is trickier than it looks, as I want the sides to be proportional, but I need them to stick out past the cabinet to account for the molding depth.

You can see in the photo to the left how the vertical side sticks out past the drawer face, and will be fit to the horizontal moldings.

The molding is made by adding a 30° chamfer on the router table. The top and bottom are a simple strip of 1" molding, and were hand-cut and fit to the sides for the appearance of a clean miter joint.

Once I had the sides and the moldings ready, it was time to fit the drawer faces. The faces were sliced out of the larger panel on the table saw, leaving a 1/8" reveal between each face. Afterwards, they were adjusted by hand using hand planes to get a tight fit. (You might notice the center of the side panel is darker here—I pre-finished the panel to ensure it would float without getting stuck. It also made it easier to finish the panel.)

Once each drawer face was adjusted, the sides, moldings, and drawer faces were all attached, finally giving the first sense of how the final cabinet would appear.

Details Matter

Since each drawer face can only fit in one place, I decided to label each drawer. Rather than use a sharpie, I lasered a letter/number grid into some extra veneer and attached it to the back of each drawer. This should help if anyone takes the cabinet apart in the future.

(This photo is before the back was attached, which was the last step before installing.)

Also visible in this photo are the soft-close drawer slides. It's amazing how the price of these items has come down so much. At the same time, with the weight in each drawer (over 10lbs in a drawer with 5 full spools), it's incredibly satisfying to be able to "slam" the drawers and have them quietly close.

Also not shown here (but shown later) are the handles, which were mortised into each drawer and hand-fit for a seamless surface on the top of the drawer face.

The Legs

The last piece to design before finishing were the legs. I had a general idea what I wanted, but needed to make sure they had enough surface to support the incredibly heavy cabinet. By the time everything was set up in the drawers and on top, this cabinet weighs well over 200lbs.

The leg structure is very short, as the final cabinet could only be 30" high, and I needed 27" between the cabinet body and countertop. So these tiny 3" legs have a 1" skirt holding them together. There's 6 primary legs, with 30° bevels cut to match the molding in them, as well as two hidden legs in the middle to give 8 legs across the whole cabinet.

The Friends We Make Along the Way

I had a friend stop by outside the shop while working. There's something wonderful working on quality furniture with nature hanging around. (This is a normal occurrence at my shop.)

Finishing

Probably the best part of any build involving solid wood is seeing it come alive with finish. This piece was finished with an oil base, followed by a hand-rubbed wipe-on poly for the final luster. The wood was sanded smooth enough to feel like glass in places.

The photos speak for themselves here.