Curio Cabinet Plans for Dummies

Plan for a curio cabinet

Out on the 'net, there are instructions and then there are instructions! The good tutorials have images or even videos to demonstrate complicated procedures. Heck, even the bad tutorials are image-rich in an era where phones are "smarter" than the people who own them. Not everything, however, is illustrated: take for instance "How to Build a Curio Cabinet,"¹ posted to Suite.io by Dianne Christensen-Hermance (sometimes known as Dianne Hermance). 

Not that images would have helped much (if at all) in this case...

For Christensen-Hermance, like so many other Dumbass of the Day candidates, her ignorance of her topic is evident from the first sentence. Dianne tells us,

"Making your own curio cabinet to display collectibles is possible and can save you some cash in the long run rather than hiring a professional."

We don't know about you, but most people don't hire professionals to build their curio cabinets: they buy them from a furniture store. Costco, even! But wait: once she begins her list of instructions, it gets even sillier. The first instruction?

"1. Make a drawing of the cabinet, then use a measuring tape to determine the needed dimensions of the cabinet."

It sounds (though we're not certain) as if Dianne's telling us to measure our curio cabinet before we've even built it. She doesn't provide details of the necessary time machine, though. Moving on... most plans provide dimensions, Dianne doesn't. What she does say is,

"2. Cut the wood you have chosen with a circular saw to lengths a little larger than you measured.

3. Cross-cut the cabinet frame pieces to the desired length and make a length-wise cut along the grain of the wood."

We're confused: isn't the carpenter's dictum "measure twice, cut once"? yet she says to measure once and cut twice... and what's this "lengthwise cut" she mentions? Now's when she starts getting weird, though:

"4. Create a rabbit joint by setting the height of the saw blade so that it only cuts through half of the board's thickness. The rabbit joint is where the top piece of the cabinet will fit into the cutout in the side. Keep repeating the cut until the piece is completely cut out."

We certainly hope the rabbit's dead before she starts cutting on it. What's that? She meant "rabbet"? In the words of the immortal Emily Litella, "Never mind." Space and time prevent us from a complete investigation of the dumbassery displayed by Ms. Christensen-Hermance, but here are some of the highlights: "Cut a miter joint, a cut at a 90 degree angle, for pieces of the door frame." A miter joint is "a cut at a 90 degree angle"? WTF? "Add tung oil to the wood with a fine wet or dry sand-paper, which will give the cabinet a nice finish..." We don't know about everyone else, but we usually sand before applying the finish, not while we apply the finish... And after applying that tung oil finish, Dianne says we should "Lightly sand the door with fine-grit sandpaper clamped to a hand sander." We repeat: Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot...

For the sins of not providing a single measurement, getting most of the steps wrong, and clearly not knowing the first thing about building cabinets, we hereby award Dianne Christensen-Hermance the Dumbass of the Day. Hell, we're thinking of giving her the Dumbass of the Year!

¹ This website is now defunct, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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