Cabinets, Shelves & Home Storage Solutions: Practical Ideas & Projects for Organizing Your Home

Though not comprehensive, this book has plenty of photos to inspire you and some good ideas for storage. The "kitchen" section has plans for building base, wall, and pantry-style cabinets which should be enough for you to extrapolate to full scale a construction effort, assuming you can work out some of the finer details on your own. I hoped to find more detail in this book. However, it is more of an overview and I think I might use this book to try a small project first, such as a garage cabinet that doesn't have to be pretty. Depending how that goes, I might tackle the kitchen remodel with higher quality materials. The introductory section shows you what tools you might use for these kinds of projects. However, one thing I was hoping for was some more information on solid woods and possibly veneers. I have questions about what to use for large surface areas if you are building with solid wood, and what to look for in solid woods for cabinet building. That kind of information is briefly mentioned but not covered in detail. The front face of doors, for instance, might be bordered by hardwood but the interior panel is thinner and usually a plywood or veneer. I was hoping this book might tell me how to make that, but it didn't (at least not in much detail). I was also hoping for more information on the wood types for cabinet bodies. It mentions particleboard and plywood but doesn't offer a lot of information on how to make these materials look nice. I was hoping for info on these details. The other sections on bedroom and closet storage are very useful. I've built strong and functional (but not pretty) shelves before; this book should help me make them prettier next time with less bulky construction. There are neat designs for under-the-bed storage and closet shelving that I intend to use one of these days.