Published on: 2025-03-14
Written by Np
I am not a woodworker but I always thought it looked fun and something doable. When I bought my van to convert to a camper I figured I would build everything myself (big mistake when it came to the fucking ceiling. Fuck ceilings. I hate ceilings). The first time I made a cabinet, I didn’t really watch any videos or read any guides on how to do it. This was a mistake. I did end up with a cabinet but there are a lot of things that any decent craftsman would notice immediately like the edges of the plywood I made it out of showing on the front face. This cabinet is my electrical cabinet in the van housing my battery and charge controller, all that jazz.
The second time around, I watched one video but couldn’t tell you which one. There’s tons on youtube and I am sure they’re all fine. I didn’t take notes. Just passively absorbed it and hoped that was all I needed. It turned out mostly fine but that is because I heavily leaned on the knowledge of my step dad who has made many cabinets. That being said, I made most of the plans myself and did pretty much all the cuts myself with only one real kind of mistake at then end of it. That didn’t stop me from thinking about how I was going to fuck it up the whole time. In fact, this cabinet was the first time I had added anything to my van in about a year because I was paralyzed by fear of fucking up. I can’t say why I let this stop me for so long, but it did.
My fist piece of advice for someone building something like this for the first or second time is to think of how long it will take you and multiply that by 3. Planning this out, I thought it would take me an afternoon but I am no craftsman and each cut took way too much time. It ended up taking pretty much an entire weekend including clean up. Now for a double whammy, my second piece of advice is to not be so stuck to the plans you make in the beginning. You’ll fuck up but that is OK. Test fit as you go and make adjustments.
What made this cabinet better than the first one was really just the design. My first cabinet I thought I could just design a fucking 4 sided box basically. Again, this worked so if you really want to keep it simple you can do this. The problem will come when you go to get hinges and realize that you should’ve built a frame for the front door to attach to. There are hinges you can buy that just go around the corner of the box, but they look worse and also protrude out from the sides of the cabinet so you can’t flush the damn thing up against anything. The second time around, I made the frame. Well, first I made the general box structure, but I had the frame in mind. For the box structure, I didn’t bother with a back because I was going to have to cut a lot out to conform around the gas tank fill protrusion on the side of my van that this was going, and I also didn’t care. I did attach some strapping across the back to give the frame more structure but otherwise, shes showin skin back there.
I also had to plan ahead for when I add butcher block to the top. I have a off cut of butcher block I am planning on using as the top, but I did not have it with me when I was making the cabinet. I wanted this one to be flush on top with my shitty cabinet so I had to really think about the height of everything if I was adding a 1.5in butcher block later. This sounds easy, but I am fucking stupid so I had to octuple check my math. I ended up putting some OSB board on top for now so I still had a usable surface and I figure I can just screw threw it later to the butcher block.
Anyways, back to the build. Once I had the main structure built , with pocket holes and glue, I test fit it inside the van to see where I needed to cut out for the gas tank thing. This was just a guess and check sort of thing. Shove it in, cut a little, try again. I am sure there are tools for this but I didn’t have them. It worked fine - maybe I cut a little more than needed but as Angela Collier says (@acollieastro on youtube check her out) its fine!
Ok now it was onto the face frame - that might not be the correct name but I think you know what I mean. If not go to your kitchen cabinets and notice that the doors don’t make up the entire front. When you open up the cabinet door, there is a frame around the entrance to the cabinet. This is what I am talking about. The rest of the cabinet was made with plywood, but according to my step dad this frame is typically a solid wood. I just used some cheap pine. This went fine until the literal last pocket hole I was screwing in. This cabinet is fairly wide, so I decided it would make sense to have two doors to open instead of one. That means the frame needs a central piece too. So I install the top, bottom and sides just fine with nails but used pocket holes for the central one. The center one’s pocket holes would screw to the top piece of the frame. Side note - I was very proud of my cut for the sides and central piece, they needed to be malleted in because they were such a perfect fit. Anyways, I screwed in nearly all the screws and then on the last one I must have hit a knot because it split dead center in the front of the frame. I know this sounds dumb but I was fucking devastated. It was right in the center of the cabinets face, a dollar bill size split. The piece that split didn’t fully detach though so after some sulking and talking to my step dad, we glued it and clamped it and hoped.
In the meantime, I went to big blue box store because the scraps I was making this thing out of had run out. My fucking god plywood prices suuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkk there. A 3/4in sheet of maple that wasn’t even that good was EIGHTY FIVE DOLLARS. Unfortunately, I needed something decent for the doors so I had to get it. I cut the doors down to the right size and at this point it was the end of the weekend. I had to pack up and finish at home. Oh right I forgot to mention instead of doing this in my tiny apartment garage I went to my parents house in the suburbs, about an hour and a half away. I didn’t finish this up until I was sure the glue had dried. A clamp was on the split for about 72 hours holding it in place. Luckily this plan worked! It looked pretty good. There was still a small crack you could see so I tried to use wood filler on it, but honestly it looks worse with wood filler. At least unpainted it does. I finished it up and with some self closing hinges and put it in the van. It looks good! I really enjoyed making it.
The entire time I was making it, the little voice in my head was telling me to stop because I was going to fuck it up. Well, I guess it was right but fuck you I made it and it works.
