Cleaf Oregon Pine Shaker Insatallation

A Look Inisde

I thought it might be interesting to take you inside an installation featuring our Oregon Pine white shaker cabinets. The image below is the kitchen of a home in Newport Beach (one block from the beach!). It's a beautiful new construction with a price tag of just under $2 Million. If you have never remodeled your kitchen, take a good look, this is about three days worth of work. There are coffee cups in the bathroom sink. Aside from our beautiful cabinets, the most interesting thing about this project is the fact that the owner had us rip out brand new cabinets. The builder chose white shaker cabinets and we are not sure who made them, but they were not worthy of this address. I have some pictures of the original cabinets and plan on posting a comparison on the website (usrtacabinets.com). From afar, like the front door, they looked great -but a closer look revealed some shoddy workmanship and cabinetry. Look for that page soon to be on our website.

Oregon Pine is a Cleaf product. Made in Italy, the material comes in 81.5" x 110.25" sheets. They are difficult to deal with until we cut them down for manufacturing. Cleaf makes the Metro series by impregnating sheets of paper with resin, forming the grain detail and then under heat, permanently bonding them to the substrate. We have a video on our website of us demonstrating it's resilience. We offer a lifetime warranty on our US made cabinets, its nice to sell Cleaf knowing that it will look just as good ten years from now. By the way, Oregon Pine shaker cabinets are our current best seller, and we are Southern California's #1 buyer of Cleaf products. Another thing that we love about Cleaf is the price. The doors and drawer fronts cost roughly half as much as paint (finishing is expensive! I'll post a look inside the finishing process for paint in the future), and they will keep their look far longer than painted doors. I plan on doing a comparison page on the website soon to give customers a good look at the pros and cons of painted doors vs. Cleaf products.

Back to the installation. The massive island will have a prep-sink in the near corner and features storage on 3 sides. The side facing in the image has an overhang for seating and 12" deep cabinets for storage. The other side has a microwave in a base cabinet and two 36", two drawer cabinets for pots and pans. The island is nearly complete, just missing a toekick skin and the tip-out tray that goes in the false drawer under the prep-sink. The side facing the living room is finished with a full width shaker side panel.

The next image shows the corner cabinets leading into the range. Both sides of the range feature a 6" spice rack pull-out from Rev-A-Shelf. The lazy susan in the base corner cabinet is also from Rev-A-Shelf. We call the corner wall cabinet above an Easy Reach cabinet. Most of our customers prefer this option over diagonal wall cabinets or blind-corners. The diagonal wall cabinet has an angled door that cuts the corner and can make the space feel cramped. Blind-corners leave hard to use space in the corner and we avoid them at all costs. The Easy Reach corner cabinet will have bi-fold doors that allow easy access.

Just to the right of the corner cabinets there is a post that juts out from the wall about 9", making a tough spot for designers. Unfortunely this post cuts the kitchen in half. The entire house is built from concrete, so no possibility of taking it out. You wouldn't want to lose any space by adding drywall on either side to flush it out. Our solution is to go around it. The image below shows the 3" deep cabinet we built to span the space. It will have tiny shelves and offer some small storage, a better solution than a blank filler covering the space. Below we made a 15" deep base cabinet, it is 15" wide to make better use of the drawer space. The wall cabinet is 8" wide.

Most homes near the beach are not huge, so storage is important. Our customer didn't want the audio equipment taking up floor space so we designed a special equipment cabinet that flanks the fireplace. The side of this cabinet is open and covered by a shaker panel with black speaker mesh which will hide the bass speaker.

The final picture I took standing in the kitching looking towards the front of the house. An odd thing happened today while we were there, a car with two women inside stopped in front of the house and they sat there looking inside. The picture doesn't relate how close the street is, from inside the house -it's very close. For a moment I thought they may be coming to the house to visit the homeowner, but they were stopped in the middle of the street. I remember thinking earlier that it was odd that there were no window coverings in the home yet. The owners recently moved in and possibly haven't purchased anything yet, but I also noticed the neighbor across the street had no coverings on their windows either. I started to wonder: maybe if you spend a couple million dollars on your home you want to be seen in it? I assume you don't see many Ferraris with tinted windows because the drivers like to be seen in their expensive car... Anyway, my partner and I started to feel really uncomfortable, like fish in a bowl. After a minute one of the ladies got out of the car, knocked on the sliding glass door, opened it and asked if the home was part of a new development. Beach communities are a world of their own.

I'll post pictures of the space once everything is finished so check back later if you're interested.

Thanks for watching!

Mike

Shipping Considerations

Custom Inset Cabinets

The image below is of our custom grey inset cabinets. These were manufactured for a local customer, though we were reluctant to offer them. Our customer had a fixed budget and originally asked us to do the inset cabinets, one look at her kitchen and budget told us they would be too expensive. Inset cabinets require more hard-wood for the frames and that means more expensive hard-wood and more work for us as the frames are hand made. This is why we were reluctant to offer them in the first place, they are labor intensive and costly. The customer understood and accepted our standard European frameless construction. Just prior to going into manufacturing, Derek (owner of the brick-and-mortar side) decided to surprise the customer with the custom inset cabinets (we're not a mindless corporation -we really do care!). They were installed last week and the customer was ecstatic.

We have tossed around the idea of offering the custom inset cabinets for online purchase, but there are a lot of logistic limitations. As I said above, they are labor intensive and require additional material, and that makes them expensive. Expense aside, the biggest hurdle is shipping. Kitchen cabinets are designed to be assembled and locked into place, they are not engineered for road trips! Our standard European frameless cabinets ship unassembled. Shipping the cabinets unassembled cuts down on the cost of freight. Freight is charged by volume, unassembled cabinets require less volume in the truck, and they can be flat-packed tightly with casework parts, doors/drawer fronts, and hardware separated. Separating the components allows for tighter packaging and a much higher degree of protection for everything. The custom inset cabinets are finished (painted) with the casework and faceframe assembled. Shipping cabinets assembled increases the freight charge two to three times. That's not even our biggest concern.

Imagine the trip these assembled cabinets would take in the back of a semi-truck. The vibration of a road trip alone is likely to cause damage, the next time you see a freight truck take a moment to observe the suspension on the trailer, they are not made for comfort, all of that vibration and bouncing is not good -and a nightmare for assembled components. The pallets are typically loaded and unloaded multiple times too (and sad to say: the people driving the forklifts are only human). Freight is picked up from us and taken to a local terminal where it is offloaded and reloaded onto a long-haul truck. Once the shipment reaches the destination terminal, the freight is unloaded and reloaded onto a local delivery truck. All of this moving around means more opportunity for damage. Even slight damage may mean a claim and shipment of replacements, that can get expensive -and there's still risk of damage to the replacements. Of course if the damage is the caused by the freight company they will pay for the replacements, but this process can take months. Look at the fine print on many cabinet companies shipping terms, they typically make the customer deal with the freight company for claims. No one wants to pay for replacements and hope the freight company reimburses the expense later, and no one wants their project delayed waiting for replacement parts. Of course we are a caring and compassionate company, and in the case of freight company damage, we immediately ship replacements at no cost to the consumer and deal with the freight company ourselves.

As a business it's hard to turn down paying customers. We know the average customer doesn't have the experience to understand all of the manufacturing and delivery concerns, and look to us for our knowledge and experience to aid them. For this product, our concern is making sure we can deliver quality cabinets that can be installed immediately without potential damage causing delays. Though the sale is enticing -we have to be responsible to our customers. Until we find bullet-proof ways to reduce the risk, inset faceframe will likely remain an option for local customers only.

Thanks for watching!

Mike

Cleaf Online Ordering

It's Alive!

I planned on blogging every day, however, as we came closer to launching our Cleaf Metro product line the ammount of work required seemed to grow exponentially. I am fairly certain that one day last week I came home dead tired and fell asleep at 6:30 p.m.! I still believe it may have been a dream (sources close to me say it really happened). Over the past few weeks my head generally hasn't hit my pillow before 1:00 a.m.

Why all of this torture? Cleaf Metro! We launched the first seven of twenty seven styles today for online ordering. We are really excited to finally see all of our hard work ammount to something actually visible online. It's alive! That's what I've been feeling today as the individual categories came online. There's still work to do, we are adding more options and working on getting the pictures of kitchens we have done in Cleaf online. The are still some styles that we haven't done an order with, so we're only able to show small swatches meant represent an entire kitchen. Then we go to work on the fifteen or so styles of the Luxe Collection.

The image below is the category page for Cleaf Metro Carbone. This is the gateway to Carbone -kind of an over view of product specifications and links to order cabinets by type. These pages were relatively easy to produce, but there are twenty-seven of them!

Below is the 'quick view' selection for ordering a 24" base cabinet. It shows the cabinet, part number , options, and price. There are also links to more information and some detailed descriptions of the cabinet and available options. The nice thing about the quick view is that from a page with say twelve different cabinets choices, you can open the quick view and configure a 12" cabinet, send it to the shopping cart, close the window and configure another cabinet of the same type without going back and forth between pages. Hm...that sounds confusing, anyway it's a nice feature and shoppers will appreciate it :)

Finally, I present a picture of Cleaf's Lakeshore Oak Shaker cabinets recently installed in a modest kitchen in Temecula. The customer is really pleased with the results and is having a professional 3D tour of this home produced (the house is a 'flip') and has promised we will get a copy once it's done (of course we will share it with you). There are some other pictures coming soon, including a San Diego condo done with Cleaf City Oak. I shared a picture of the 'under-stairs' glass door cabinet a few posts ago and people are still asking to see the whole project. It's coming, I promise!

Thanks for watching!

Mike

That's Life

Cleaf Metro Product Setup...cont'd

On Sunday, I wrote about the setup of the new product we were hoping to launch this weekend. It didn't happen. What did happen is we realized that one of the product options, 'cabinet height', wouldn't work as we planned. The issue is really a technical one on the part of our ecommerce host. We offer 5 choices for casework material and 3 part numbers for width, so say you choose a 15" cabinet in x material, y width, the price would be z -no problem. The next choice would be height, and there is the problem is created. Using this setup would require us to show each width and height option, in each casework material option -as an option. This would make the option list massive, too massive. The alternative would be to use dropdown menus for each option. The image below is our current option setup for this cabinet.

Hate is a pretty strong word, so I'll just say, as online shoppers ourselves, we are not fans of dropdown menus. Our setup takes 2 mouse clicks to get from the first page, or category page for this item, to the option configuration. 6 mouse clicks to configure the options and add to a cart. Dropdown menus double the clicks required to configure a product: 1 click to open the menu and 1 to select the option. That's a total of 12 clicks to configure the same options and 16 total to get to it, configure it, and put it in a cart. Another issue with dropdowns: you can't see the available options until you click the dropdown. Not very user friendly. So stuck between a rock and a hard place, we chose to do the extra work in creating individual part numbers for each width and height and preserve our clean 8 click ordering process, actually, taking height out of the options drops our click number to 7.


There was never really a choice. We had to do the work up front necessary to make it as easy as possible for our customers to shop with us. It's a little disappointing that we missed another self-made deadline, but at the end of the day we know we are doing the right thing.


I talked about a new Cleaf kitchen we began work on Friday. The picture below is a Lakeshore Oak Shaker wall cabinet. These are being readied for installation on Thursday, actually they will be ready today, but the customer isn't ready for them until Thursday. We started work manufacturing these cabinets on Friday, and they are ready to install after only 2 and a half days! I'll have more pics of these cabinets at the end of the day.

Thanks for watching!

Mike

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

Cleaf Metro Product Setup

We've been working on making the Cleaf Metro Collection available for online ordering for 3 or 4 weeks now. It's quite a challenge. There are 27+ styles, around 180 individual cabinets, and around 16-20 different options for each cabinet. Hm...27 x 180 x 20= 97,000-ish entries on an excel spread sheet! The picture below is a bit of what that looks like.

This is what I'm working on today. Reviewing the spreadsheets in preparation of making the products live on our website. There are two main spreadsheets involved: Products and Product options. The products sheet columns go from A to BG, that's like 59 columns with 180 rows. I was curious about how many individual characters each row used so I used the =LEN function in excel to count the characters in each column in the row (I probably know more about excel than is healthy -a necessary evil for sure). The answer is 1,800. Take that number and multiply by 180 rows: 324,000 individual characters. That's a lot of typing! Luckily we are able to copy and past large portions of that data and then make changes based on the part number we are dealing with. That's a look at the information required to get an entire product line like Cleaf Metro online.

Oh, but we're not done yet! There's images! The image below shows the three images created for each of the 180 individual cabinet types. These are created in the software we use to design and manufacture the cabinetry. Each one was constructed in the software and screen shots were taken of each view. The images are then cropped in photo shop, saved with unique names, and then uploaded to the website. After that, each image must be attached to each product type so when a customer is ordering they can see what it is they are after. I mentioned product options above, some of the options have individual pictures too. For example: each cabinet we offer comes with a choice of casework material (casework is all of the parts made to build the cabinet not including the doors, drawer fronts, and hardware). Images for these options are created as well. And then there's the images of the kitchens and bathrooms we have taken of our projects with Cleaf Metro that we need to put online.

There is another area that we had to work on as well: pricing. Each cabinet, each size of that cabinet, and each option for that size cabinet has a cost that we have to know. The first step in pricing a cabinet is to take each individual part of the cabinet and figure out how many square feet of material each part needs. Parts also need edgebanding, we need to know how many feet of edgebanding for each part too. Then there's the doors and drawer fronts which use different materials. Hardware and options like 1 door or 2 door, 3 drawers or 4 drawers all have to be calculated and input too. That's an entire excel workbook of its own.

This is my work today. Reviewing all of this information so we can launch the Cleaf Metro products. After that, we move on to setting up the Luxe Collection by Alvic. 21 styles with options...

Thanks for watching!

Mike

It's Still This Week

Custom Cleaf Metro 'under the stairs' Cabinet

I mentioned we were working on this cabinet last night. It's the final piece of the San Diego condo project we've been working on. A complete set of those pictues will be posted soon. It goes with a set of cabinets we already installed under the stairway. We are wrapping up our work on the condo and should have a complete set of pictures to share soon, including a custom floating entertainment center we designed and built today, a last minute add-on from the customer.

The material is Cleaf Metro City Oak. This condo is in downtown San Diego, so the name fits perfectly. Since the cabinet has glass doors and the interior is visible, we used the same City Oak to make the casework. We used Blum clip-top soft close hinges and a piano hinge between the two doors. I did the programming for the doors on the CNC last night, it was a bit of a challenge since we typically do square doors.

The program used to design the doors is called woodWop and came preinstalled on our CNC. We already had the casework completed so I knew the outside dimensions of the doors, the tricky part was the inner open sections. I had to tell the CNC where to start cutting and where to go after that. We had no prototypes or any previous work to take from so I decided to draw a full-scale layout of the doors on a table. This enabled me to measure accurate dimensions and figure out exactly what to input into the program. I ran two prototypes in a different material and fit them on the casework to ensure the reveals were correct. A reveal is the portion of the casework that is visible around the doors. In this case 1/16th of an inch on both sides, 1/4" on the top, and the doors are flush with the bottom. This is our standard 'overlay', which is the term used when discussing how the doors overlap the casework, and is typical of European Frameless cabinetry. Frameless meaning there is no 'face-frame', which is like a picture frame around the opening of the cabinet. A Face-frame is the traditional method for constructing cabinets. We are very happy with how this cabinet turned out, and are eager to complete the project and post pictures. The kitchen was done in City Oak as well and looks great.

We also started work on another Cleaf project today, this time in Lakeshore Oak. The cabinets for this kitchen were cut this morning on the CNC, edgebanded, and assembly is underway and will be completed Monday. I'm working on a video of the entire manufacturing process and will share it when it's done.

I plan on posting at least once a day, I really enjoy what I do, and being able to share makes it more fun.

Thanks for watching!

Mike

Another Late Night...

CLEAF Metro Collection Update

A picture taken in the shop today. The foreground is Cleaf Metro Pebble Beach, and the background is Cleaf Metro Cool Grey Linen (the two Cleaf linen textures will be available as casework material!). We have some information and additional pictures of the linen texture on our 'Materials' page if you are curious. We are working towards launching the online ordering for all 27 Cleaf Metro styles this week. We are big fans of this product and our customers are too, all of the Cleaf pictures on our website are from our jobs -we have done a lot of Cleaf for local customers and are excited to be making it available for online ordering in a couple days. I have a ton of pictues of the kitchens and bathrooms we've done with Cleaf Metro and will be sharing them once I get a chance to get them off the camera. I also posted a video of our CNC cutting a Cleaf Carbone panel, it's interesting if you are curious about how we manufacture cabinets. There's also one of us trying to demonstrate the resilience of the product...I should probably apologize for the music now -just in case you decide to watch that video.

The image above is the product we will be launching shortly after Cleaf Metro goes online. Pictured is Textile Oro, it's a product by Alvic called 'Luxe'...we love it! I posted this particular picture because we just had our first customer for Luxe select this for their kitchen cabinets. The edge banding is two-tone and looks awesome, my picture doesn't really capture the beauty of this door, the 'textile' pattern looks like spun gold when the light catches it right. The Luxe Collection will feature 21 styles including High Gloss (Textile Oro is High Gloss), and my personal favorite the 'Supermatte' and 'MetalDeco' series. Alvic has a great video about the series if you are interested. I was an instant fan the moment I saw the product, I would love to do my kitchen in the Antracita Supermatte or Metal Deco. Anyway, that's coming soon.

I plan on posting some images of a Cleaf Metro City Oak cabinet we did for a San Diego customer. It's a unique cabinet, it goes under the stairway so it has an interesting shape. We're putting glass in the doors tomorrow and then it will be ready to install. We remodeled this customers condo with Cleaf Metro throughout and I'll have some pictures of that soon as well.

Wow! Look at the time...I better sleep.

Thanks for watching!

Mike