Would you like to spend 50% less on custom built cabinets in exchange for some hassle? First of all, apologies if “woodworking” might not fit the traditional meaning of the craft, but I will use it here nonetheless.

My second kid was almost here, we were finishing a renovation on the house that we bought, and we still had absolutely zero furniture, cabinets, and storage. Our savings were almost exausted but we needed a way to have some storage for when we decided to move in.

We already had the projects from our architect about what needed to be builted/crafted, so I started asking for quotes to the woodworking shops around here. Even though pricing was a huge issue, their delivery time was a complete no-go: my son would be 2 weeks old when they had to install the cabinets and I really wanted to avoid any unnecessary chaos on my house.

What kind of magic would I need to pull off to have more than 20 custom-made MDF furniture in less than 30 days, without me having to risk to cut a finger by building myself?

A dear friend of us shared their experience by directly hiring a wood furniture designer, taking the detailment sheet to retail woodworking store, asking them to cut the MDF sheets following the part list, and finally hiring a “handy-man” to assembly and install the cabinets.

So that’s what I did. I decided to be the middle-man and be manage all these steps.

Oh boy.

The designer

I found really hard to find someone that you can hire to do the design/parts-list. I found a guy from OLX ( the Brazil’s Craiglist), talked on the phone with him for a while, and I decided to do a small test, just 4 cabinets.

He asked for real measurements from the local, the architect projects, and after few days he handed out a parts list. It specified the cabinets parts like this:

Qty Length (mm) Width (mm) Edge L1 Edge L2 Edge W1 Edge W2 Material Designation
1 900 250         Branco TX 15 Aux-Mesa
2 793 345 X X X X Branco TX 15 M01-Porta
1 770 670         Branco TX 15 M01-Fundo
2 770 400   X     Branco TX 15 M01-Lateral
1 770 510         Branco TX 15 M02-Fundo

Also, he gave me a PDF with instructions about how to assemble the cabinets.

The cut-to-size store

There is SaaS here in Brazil called cortecloud where you can upload a parts list and ask for a quote to cut-to-size stores. The process was the following:

  1. Upload the parts list
  2. Mark any part that need special service, such as drilling for door hinges;
  3. Properly configure the special service, by marking as “Door” type and choosing the correct side for the drilling for example;
  4. Generate the service. Here you can check the cut plan generated and the simulated cost.
  5. If something is wrong, go back to step 1 and repeat.
  6. If everything is ok, you can them directly reach the salesman at the store and ask for a real quote.

I found out the step 3 was really easy to make a mistake and mess up (spoiler alert: of course I messed up, by choosing the wrong side for the drilling. It is beyond me to understand why the PM/PO for this feature at this SaaS decided to force us to fill this special service by hand).

Anyway, I found three stores close to me with good enough ratings that I wanted to quote, but I gave up asking for a quote on all of them. The SaaS didn’t allow me to reuse a same parts-list and just ask for quotes, I had to create three different projects, and perform steps 1 to 3 over and over again. I went with two of them.

Most stores didn’t have updated parts cost on the SaaS, so the simulated cost diverged a lot from the real quote received by end directly with the salesman.

The cut-to-size store that I chose would deliver all the parts in 5 weekdays. Once I approved the quote and payed for the service, it seems that the cut plan on step 4 would be automatically loaded on their CNC machine (or whatever they use to cut the MDF sheets), leaving no margin for customizations or adjustments even if I requested to the salesman.

And, these are some parts of this painful process:

The cabinet installer

Even though I always feel adventurous and bold when faced by tens of screws and wood parts disassembled in front of me, I knew that my zero experience assemblying MDF cabinets would not be appreciated by my very pregnant wife.

What my dear designer told me is that I needed a “woodworking” guy, someone who could manage to fix any kind of mistakes either from the project or from the cut-to-size store. Someone who could trim and fit nicely a MDF strip to make the cabinet look perfectly installed.

I also needed someone willing to work on weekdays, and with a reasonable price.

I called at least 35 people. Most of them didn’t have experience with custom cabinets, and only two guys were able to take the job.

The first, lets call John, was incredible cheap, but could only work on Saturdays. I hired him for the first cabinets, and it was nicely done on a single saturday. I found out that John worked at a woodworking company, and he was looking for a side gig thus why he couldn’t work on weekdays. Unfortunaly the birth of my son was my deadline and the remaining saturdays would not be enough for all the cabinets that I planned to order and install.

Then I did the calling frenzy aforementioned and found the second guy, Mark. Mark was prepared, plenty of experience and positive ratings on Google. He was more expensive than John, but still a reasonable price. I hired him for the remaining cabinets, and he did a great job overall.

Nice right?

The problems

The designer was a smooth talker and he did several mistakes. Some that I remember are these:

  • He forgot to discount the thickness of the MDF on the first cabinet, and John had to trim the part.
  • The parts list that he gave me for the first bedroom didn’t have the right edge bands marked. John had to manually glue the bands
  • The parts list for the second bedroom had four doors with bad dimensions. Mark was pissed, because he had to try several hinge types to make the doors look acceptable.
  • A drawer cabinet had some critical mistakes, that Mark took two days to fix, where it would be a half a day job.

But one of the most impressive blunders was from the cut-to-size store. I ordered the cabinets parts for the first bedroom at a given store through the Cortecloud SaaS, and they were great. They delivered fast, all the parts were perfectly cut and clean. John took three Saturdays to assemble and install them, but they sure looked great.

I ordered the second bedroom (that had a very different project for the cabinets) at the same store, and I am not joking if I tell you that they delivered the CABINET PARTS FOR THE FIRST BEDROOM AGAIN. And the best part was that Mark and I only realized after 2 hours assembling it.

I was pissed, because I had extra assembly costs, I had to wait the store to run again the cut service. They covered other costs though. Apparently their CNC-machine-or-whatever had mistakenly ran the first cut plan twice, which they insisted was something impossible to happen.

Closing thoughts

More than 15 cabinets later, I learned several woodworking and cabinetry terms and gotchas. I was confortable reviewing the parts-list from the designer, I figured it out a procedure to reduce manual mistakes when using the cut-to-size SaaS, and I even learned how to assemble and install MDF cabinets from seeing John and Mark doing it.

It took 45 days from the design and assembly of all the cabinets, whereas if I went through the traditional way of hiring a shop to do it it would take at least 90 days, for a single cabinet. It seems all these shops around me had huge order backlogs.

When comparing price, I paid 50% less comparing to the traditional way.

We hired a cabinetry shop to manufacture the cabinets for the kitchen due to its complexity, and I compared their quality with the quality of the other cabinets.

I can safely say they are like 85% close in quality.