Tom,
I am writing the following from my own experience, with the hope of encouraging you to "go for it."
I was in much the same position 20 years ago that you are now, except that I had no Festools, no FOG helpers, a Shopsmith and some Craftsman power tools including a radial arm saw. I redid all of the cabinets in my small kitchen using solid cherry for the face frames and doors and drawer fronts, motivated as you are by the need to modify one of the cabinets to fit a microwave/vent unit over the cooking range, and installation of a dishwasher. The original cabinets weren't even cheap boxes. Ryan Homes simply fastened a couple of rails (furring strips to the drywall to support the backs of the shelves and drawer guides, built a toe-kick support for the floor of the cabinet, and installed painted poplar face frames to which they fastned the doors (vinyl coated particle board).
I built new face frames using dowels, assembled them on the garage floor. One piece for the upper hanging "cabinet" , a second face frame for the lower "cabinet." To accomodate the utensils and cookware my wife had, I replace the original stack of 3 nearly equal depth drawers with 4 drawers with the top one being less deep than the original (to hold tableware type utensils) and the third down and bottom most drawer deep enough to hold her pots and large boiler for making soupls and chilli. The drawers were fully dovetailed, front and back using a cheap Craftsman jig with plastic templates, and mounted on Blum slides.
I finished the insides and undersides of the drawers using lacquer sanding sealer and lacquer topcoat. Everthing else to be exposed was finished using oil-based stains, top coated wih PU varnish. Back then my brush technique wasn't very good, so I brushed the first coat or two, and applied the final finish coat using spray cans from Minwax. To get the degree of gloss/flatness of finish that I wanted, I concurrently sprayed the same surface with both a gloss and a satin spray can. Although I had conventional HP spray equipment, I did not want to use lacquer for the exterior exposed surfaces in the kitchen because it was too brittle and easily damaged if bumped. I did not want to spray varnish in my garage due to its slow drying time and resulting tacky mist particles that would settle on everything in the garage. My solution was to take the pieces to be sprayed outside and set them up on inverted plastic drywall pails with ply wood or boards for temporary supports.
I also made a set of hanging cabinets from scratch (no plywood, all solid cherry), and hung them to serve as a partial divider between that kitchen and the adjoining dining room. I built them with glass paneled doors on the front and back so their contents could be seen and reached from either room. I had an art glass shop make a leaded glass fixture which I mounted within the recess in the bottom of that hanging cabinet. Below that hanging cabinet I made a large butcher block style table top of maple strips with a rim of thicker cherry. which served dual functions as a working surface for food preparation (the left 1/3 portion replaced the original maple top of a single ~24" wide base cabinet) and as my family's (four people) daily meal table.
When it came time to sell that house ~7 years ago, the kitchen was one of the highlights that "grabbed" all prospective buyers. And my wife still misses it, despite having a much larger professionally done kitchen, also of cherry. She much preferred the warmth, depth, and clarity of the finish I achieved using the methods and materials described above over the modern HVLP sprayed catalyzed lacquer finish on our present cabinets which is extremely smooth, but lacks the clarity and visibility of the wood grain that my simple techniques provided.
One more point. The cost of my kitchen project was about 1/5 of the lowest quote that my wife and I obtained, and that did not include the arched cabinet doors, or the new hanging cabinet dividing the two rooms.
We were living in the house when this project was in progress. Because I did it in phases, the disruption wasn't too bad or long.
Did I make some mistakes? Yes, but most miscut pieces could be salvaged, and even so, the project cost was still much lower than what others would have charged me.
With my much improved shop including several Festools, I think making the same kitchen cabinets or better ones having actual boxes for frames will be much simpler. A pocket jig or Domino machine or biscuit jointer would make making face frames and boxes much easier, faster and accurate than the methods I used (dowels, rabbets and dados with glue only - no pin or brad nailer). I plan to do that after making some furniture items, after making some cabinets, etc. for my current garage/shop.
Go for it!! You can do it!!
Dave R.
