Home Office Cabinetry Project Example
Home Office Cabinetry is always functional to some degree or should be. Often the area and furniture people have available or on hand just, don’t work. Won’t function as you need them for how you work and quite frankly don’t fit the room’s decor or your personal style. Office work areas need not be flat surfaces with a keyboard tray and printer in a real or imagined cubical volume of space.
A good solution is unique, tailored to your specific needs and style of home office. A wonderful example is this home office with the results in progress. A General Contractor we often work with, called Alexanders to be part of this project. We worked directly with the client and her friend, an architect refining a concept based on her very specific detailed needs.
Our client’s needs were rather numerous. Folder file storage in general and specifically having lateral files along the work area. Very exact height on the keyboard tray, pullouts on either side and a covered area for wires. The typical modern remote work equipment has multiple components and many wired connections. Easily resulting in an octopus-tentacled mess, even with cable management. Alexanders has a number of solutions to inconspicuously hide all that while maintaining easy access.
Looking closely at the pullout side trays for this client. They needed to appear to be typical drawer fronts not disturbing the aesthetic. However, there could be no lip above the flat surface when pulled out. Along with some restrictions through the design minutia, and attention to detail. All of the details were worked out prior to fabrication and presented for client approval. We always working to make sure everyone is on the same page and understanding the end result.
The image below shows the function of the pull-out tray. There are many ways and multiple hardware solutions to accomplish this. We choose an option that was very sturdy and had very little wobble for working on a second laptop alongside the main keyboard. While not looking like a pullout, per the client’s request. A very labor-intensive detail that will likely never be noticed, as we would like it to be. However, that is the nature of fine cabinetry and architectural woodwork. When well executed even the most labor-intensive work appears to be done effortlessly.
Home Office Cabinetry needs to function seamlessly, without notice, for the long haul of extended use. Often more so than even functional parts of kitchen cabinetry. The feel of a wobbly keyboard tray pullout can be felt under each key stroke. Drawers are similar, especially file drawers. One of the reasons we use side mount guides on all our drawers. Far superior to the cost effective standard guides in most retail cabinets. And even the uber expensive German under-mounts have a loose feel to them. It’s great for cabinet shops as the labor and tolerances are less than side-mounts, without much difference in cost to the end user.
Available side mount drawer guides come in three different flavors, types. The basic is just a drawer guide. Any dampening (softening the hit) when the drawer closes is done by other means. Like rubber stops. Most mechanics tool boxes use these. The most common is a self damping and locking at the close of the drawer. The third is a self close, often called soft close. These will typically draw the drawer close once past 3/4 of the way in. Each of the types have models that can generally support 75lbs, 100lbs, 140lbs and some up to 350lbs. Click here to see some more of the various drawer slides that can be used in Custom Cabinetry.
We could go on and on about all the minute details of home office cabinetry and custom cabinetry in general. As there are many more fine not so simple details that can be seamlessly integrated into any cabinet. Along with the challenges we happily overcame with the Cabinetry on this project. It’s what custom cabinet makers should do….. Find more about our custom cabinetmaker services