One question I have gotten about the cabinet job Paul and I are working on is what we are doing for the doors and drawer fronts. Something fancy with raised panels and beaded rails and stiles?  A wildly veneered flat panel door?

Actually, Paul wants to go simple.  Slab doors made of cherry. This way, the doors will match those in the tidy and well laid out kitchen.

And, no, we’re not building them.  He ordered them from Raw Doors online, an outfit that makes all kinds of doors including the basic solid wood slab doors.

Surprising, isn’t it?

Paul had his reasons, and when I left his house this past Saturday, he told them to me.

First, he said that he wanted to learn how to build cabinets.  That’s why he asked me to build them – this way, he could get the cabinets he needed and see how one woodworker does the task.  No truer statement could have been made – we have both learned a lot from this project. Did he need to learn how to edge glue boards together?  No.  That’s pretty much what we would have been doing to build the doors anyway.

Second, there is the time factor. Paul’s a busy guy. And, he also respects the fact that I’m eking out time after work and on weekends.  Building the doors and drawer fronts would have taken a considerable amount of time for all of the glue ups, but only a few weeks when ordered online.

Finally, we’re building this project in Florida. Solid cherry is available here – at a premium price. The cost between the complete set of doors built by Raw Doors and all of the stock wood wasn’t very large, so it made sense economically as well.

Paul and his wife Gail are finishing the doors in their garage, and they are looking very good. Visions of well-aligned drawer fronts and doors enclosing the insides of the project are dancing in my head…

For those playing along, today is Labor Day in the United Sates and Canada, so let’s hear it for those hard working men and women who bust their butts every other day of the year!

Today, sit back, relax, and I’ll tell you a story about a guy who really did some work.

His name is Hercules, a mythical Roman figure (who went as Heracles in Greece…) who was asked by Jupiter (Zeus in Greece) to come over for some pizza and beer in order to help scratch a few things off the to do list around Mount Olympus.

Well, just as everyone knows, when you are asked to ‘lend a hand’ tackling a few chores, the magnitude of the tasks at hand seems to grow exponentially. Before he knew it, Hercules was asked to go and handle some tasks that were believed to be so difficult that no mortal could complete them.

You know, easy stuff like slaying the Nemean lion, capturing the Golden Hind of Artemis and obtaining the Girdle of the Amazon Queen. I can see the exchange now. “Jupiter, seriously?  You want me to go on a panty raid?”

One of the most demeaning tasks for our hero was that he had to clean the Augean stables in a single day. Since these cattle were immortal, they created quite a healthy layer of cow pies. And, since everyone looked the other way for the  30 years prior to his job, well, it was piled higher than you could find on Capitol Hill.  Just barely.

Our pal Hercules had a trick up his sleeve (he’s usually painted at least half-naked, so I’m wondering where he may have actually hid that trick.  In his boot, perhaps?) and turned hydraulic engineer, diverting a few rivers through the stables.  Before you can say, “Don’t drink the water downstream!” the stables were sparkling and shiny new.

I’m wondering if I can give good old Hercules a call to give me a hand with my shop…

Now that the cabinet job is entering its final phases, just about all of the pieces that need to go to Paul’s house are there.  Which means I no longer have any excuses for not being able to get to the dust anymore. All of those piles of sawdust and tools I took out but never put back immediately are out there, taking up space. The plug ends of tools are mixed together in a knot on the floor near my power strip…. so I have to sort those out. The vacuums are full of dust and shavings and need to be emptied … aww, heck, it looks like my day off from work is going to have me out in the shop.

Well, at least I have a barbecue on the schedule today… that will give me some time to rest before my next labor.