Got told my face frames were overbuilt and it stung

An old timer I worked with on a kitchen job in Denver last summer looked at my face frames and said they looked like furniture legs, not cabinets. He pointed out I was using 1x4 poplar where 1x2 would do just fine for most standard panels and it was adding 30 bucks per cabinet in waste. I argued for a minute but then I looked at his work and he was right, his frames were lighter and still held up perfect. After that I switched to 1x2 for the sides and top rails and kept 1x4 for the bottom and stiles where the drawer slides hit. It cut my material costs by about 15 percent on a big 30 cabinet job and the client never noticed a thing. Have you ever had someone call out a habit you thought was non-negotiable and then you realized they were right?

2 comments

2 Comments

abby_black5d ago

That line about "non-negotiable" really hit home. My best friend was a pastry chef for years and she swore up and down she HAD to use this specific brand of vanilla extract for her buttercream. One day a customer at her pop-up asked why her frosting was so dark and mentioned it looked like she was using vanilla extract instead of paste. She got defensive but then tried the paste the next batch and it was a total lightbulb moment. She told me she felt dumb for arguing so hard about something she learned ONE way from her first job. Now she laughs about it and says she wasted hundreds of dollars on fancy vanilla that made her frosting look muddy.

hugo_bennett4d ago

Oh man, that is SO frustrating but also SO relatable. It's wild how we cling to those "rules" we pick up early on, especially when they come from a mentor or that first job. I've been there with a totally different thing - someone swore I needed this expensive brand of olive oil for a basic vinaigrette and I defended it like my life depended on it. Turns out any decent one works fine and I was just being stubborn about a habit. Your friend's story is a perfect example of how a simple customer question can COMPLETELY shift everything we thought we knew. It's a good reminder to always question WHY we think something is non-negotiable, right?