First off I want to say that this project is being done as a gift for my wife. If you have read through my boat project you know that my wife has been diagnosed with cancer. She has a form of breast cancer called Inflamatory Breast Cancer.(IBC) This particular cancer does not form as lumps. Therefore detection is much harder and generally much later, than standard varieties. Istead it grows in sheets or nodes that are virtualy undetectable by self tests or standard mamagrams. Another difference in this type of cancer is the age bracket it targets. This cancer targets women (and some men) of all ages. It also happens to be the breast cancer with the highest fatality rate.

More information can be found at www.mayoclinic.com.

Her treatment begins with four chemotherapy treatments, then surgery, four more chemo treatments, and finally a year of radiation treatments. Since she will have alot of "down time" where she will be unable to work or do any strenuous movement, I felt that giving her an area to do her little crafts and flowers would be good mental therapy.

First I took measurements of the room that her youngest son had recently vacated including doors and windows. With that in hand my computer was fired up and it was put into cad as a floor plan. Once all the dimensions where completed, I printed it out and went to the local Home Depot. There I looked at different shelving and cabinet units trying to get a mental image of what was locally available.Unfortunately nothing really caught my attention.

Later, while in Sears to pick up a half sheet sander, I took a stroll through the tool department (My idea of shopping) and "happened across" the new garage organizers. This gave me a basis for my craft room storage design.

Firing up the computer again I did a search for cabinetry and finally settled on Mills Pride as my primary vendor. It is locally available at Home Depot, is customizable, and the price was acceptable. Going through their catalog I made a list of wants, needs, and justifications. (have to justify those wants you know)

My initial idea was to provide a counter top centered under the large bedroom window, tall cabinets on each side, a shelf above the window, and some smaller cabinets under the counter. Between the counter and the bottom cabinets I would install a pull out tabletop to expand the workspace.

Using the online catalog for Mills Pride I entered several different cabinets into my autocad room layout. Moving them around in the drawing I came up with what I thought was a workable design. It was then a matter of making a list of parts to buy at Home Depot.

Making the parts list was a bit more complicated than I liked as each cabinet has to be ordered as seperate pieces. For instance; the left side cabinet was made up of a base number, a shelving number, an upper door pack number, a lower door pack number, and a slide out drawer (optional) number. multiply that by 2 tall cabinets, two shorter cabinets, a large center cabinet and the small side shelves that I added and you can imagine the list size:)

Next step was to price out all of the components. Normally you would think that a chain like Home Depot would have a set pricing structure. However, that is not nessisarily the case........