Protracted People's Poplar Project

Last November, my sister got married, and in the months long preparations for this event, we had to consider shoe storage. I was asked to build a larger shoe cabinet and I obliged, knowing that there was no way I could complete it to my standards before the date. There, we ended up stacking some 2x12s on some cinderblocks, more than sufficient for the guests. (You can see the state of the cabinet in November later in the article.)

Obligatory Simpsons Clip

It’s a garage cabinet for holding shoes, so I was certainly not going to make it out of hardwood, but I cannot conscience making it out of anything worse than poplar plywood. This stuff is fairly nice to work with. It’s not very dense, so don’t expect it to take a hit well, but it’s uniform and generally void-free.

The extent of the planning on this is this sketch, which allowed me to figure how much lumber I’d need to purchase.

I started sometime around late September 2025.

I started with the carcass, of course. I ripped 1 full sheet of 3/4” into 5 panels, three 16” x 64” and two 16” x 32”. The dimensions were chosen to use the greatest portion of the purchased lumber possible. Four of these pieces will form the outsides of the carcass, and the last 16” x 64” piece ripped in twain forms the rear strechers/nailers.

This picture is from October 1, 2025.

I opted to dovetail join the carcass, just as a fun experiment in cutting joinery in plywood, and to punish me the Divine cursed me to make The Mistake.

This picture is dated October 2, 2025:

After completing the carcass, the project lay dormant for quite a while.

Here it is in a picture dated October 11, 2025:

Here it is in the background of another project dated November 3, 2025:

On January 12, 2026 I swept the shop again:

Sometime between then and February 18, 2026…

I managed to install the backing 1/4” ply and the shelves (plus some bragging for the Instagram story):

Now for the interesting part, the sliding doors. The design is entirely based on this article from Fine Woodworking, with one caveat. I had already glued up the carcass and there was no way I could easily locate and push the grooving plane inside the finished width, so I added in a poplar strip with the grooves cut by dado stack on the table saw.

Tuning the fit is an essential part of the process if you want smooth movement all the way across the width, especially with something as large a span as this. I can’t count how many times I took the doors out. It can be quite confusing to know where to remove material. I found that rubbing pencil on the inside of the track will leave an imprint on the door rabbet whereever it might bind.

It is difficult to understand the smoothness of this movement without sound, but you’ll just have to imagine it.

Here it is all built, on February 28, 2026:

Of course, it was not for another month (March 26, 2026) that the cabinet would actually get installed in its final place in my garage:

Peep the precarious network rack situation. It’s housing a very heavy lead-acid UPS, held in with three screws. This was fairly quickly remedied with some steel shelf brackets.