I finally had to stop working Sunday evening at around 5pm when my hands went numb. After what felt like hours of running the orbital sander over every edge and face of a large pile of cabinet doors and drawer-fronts, the vibration left my hands buzzing with pins and needles. When I counted them up, I had only sanded 11 of the 26 doors and drawer-fronts I had made in the preceding 2 days.



I started the weekend off intending to only make as many doors as I could sand and put a coat of finish on inside of a couple of hours. I reasoned that I could then do a quick sand and apply another coat of finish every night after work and be ready to install them by the next weekend. Then, I would start the process over and repeat until all of my doors, toe-kicks, and filler strips were done.

However, when I got into the process of making the doors, I found it went a lot faster if I created a bit of an assembly-line method. The process I ended up with allowed me to make more than twice the number of pieces as I planned, but has left me with quite a pile of finishing work to do. And that's no short process.

I've already finished the cover panels I made and installed. So I have a process for that as well. Unfortunately, it requires a thorough sanding of all sides of each piece to start. Then 2 coats of polyurethane on the inside, and 4 coats on the outside of each piece. Sanding between every coat. And if that didn't sound like a long enough process already, I'm brushing it on since there's no way I can set up a reasonable spray booth to handle this many pieces at once. Needless to say, I'm going to be at it for a while. Still, the end is very near now.

As a side-note, we actually cooked a complete meal in the kitchen for the first time over the weekend. We don't have doors so nothing is put away, but the appliances are all functional (except the dishwasher) and we're already loving the new kitchen. Just a little farther now.