Kitchen Desk Cabinet

We have a desk in our kitchen that is built into the wall. We do not really use this as a desk. The area under then desk where the chair would go is wasted space. An extra cabinet is always useful in a kitchen.

I also had a bunch of mahogany plywood I had bought for the Master Bath Remodel Project. The original plan was to use this plywood to replace with bathroom vanity doors and match the mahogany used throughout the rest of that project. I decided to leave the existing white cabinets in place, so had two 4x8 sheets of very nice mahogany that had been sitting in my garage for about 10 years. The cabinets in my kitchen are more a dark walnut/oak color, so mahogany is not the best match, but I also have a mahogany bench nearby and the contrast between the two wood species was not that disorienting.

This project was done concurrently with the related Kitchen Desk Organizer Project. I started both in February 2024 and finished both at the same time in March 2024. They were both using the same pre-existing mahogany plywood so I needed to plan how to cut up the sheets with both projects in mind.

Most of this cabinet will be hidden with only the front door side visible most of the time. However, I wanted this cabinet to be multi-functional so that you could slide the cabinet out and also add some horizontal extra counter/table space. And since I am not making this a built-in, but movable piece, who knows where it might end up in the future, so I did want to make sure it looked nice from all angles as a stand-alone piece. This meant I would need to buy some mahogany banding to cover the plywood edges that would be exposed. I tried to minimize how many plywood edges would be exposed in the design, but some were inevitable.

The design was pretty straightforward as it was just a box. The joinery choices the only real question. I would use dado grooves for the sides and bottom, then special table-top fasteners for the top to allow for expansion/contraction. As I often do now, I use the Blender 3D modeling software to help me visualize, nail down the final dimensions and make sure there are no geometric surprises.