Happy Columbus Day! Or as my Italian wife refers to it… “Better than St. Patrick’s Day.” We hope you all had a great weekend. We made some solid progress on our media cabinet. The face frame is built and I’ll be starting on the cabinet boxes shortly. I filmed almost all of the face frame construction and I plan on doing the same for the rest of the build. Hope you like videos, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of them soon.
On Friday, we left off with some cut sheets that I used to draw up a shopping list. Today, we’re going to discuss actually buying the material.
Our shopping list consisted of one 4×8 sheet of 3/4″ thick paint-grade plywood and a couple boards of paint grade hardwood. Let’s start with the plywood.
What to avoid: Framing, roofing or flooring plywood.
Why not? Well, these types of plywood are designed for their particular application. For a paint-grade project, we want something that has a smooth finish on both sides that’s also knot free. Most of these construction quality plywood sheets are going to have a significant amount of defects that won’t leave you with a quality finish. The tempting thing about these lower grade plywood options is their price. They may be up to half the cost of the plywood I normally use.
What to look for: A quality furniture grade plywood, like this Birch plywood. It’s finish grade on both sides, it’s strong and it’s designed for cabinet builds.
Now here’s the bad news: the price.
The good news is I only need one sheet. That’s a lot of money for some plywood. Here’s the deal though, in total, this cabinet will probably cost under $125 and I’m hoping it lasts a long, long time. So, spending $50 on some plywood isn’t that terrible if you put it in perspective.
With my sheet in hand, I took it over to the panel saw and had the lumber associate cut it into four sections so I could fit it in my car.
For the hardwood boards, I like poplar. Poplar is fairly inexpensive and it’s perfect for paint. Maple would also be a great choice. Unless you are planning on staining a project like this, I’d avoid oak or cherry. And yes, you could use pine, especially a high quality pine, but it’s a softwood so expect it to show wear and tear over time. The hardwoods like poplar tend to hold up better.
So that’s my 2 cents on buying paint grade lumber from your local big hardware store. You may also want to look for some local non-chain lumber yards as well. Sometimes they have a better variety of plywoods and most will special order some if you’re looking for it.
In our next post, we’ll have a video on building the face frame.
