How I'm Saving $15K on Our Kitchen Reno

White oak kitchen cabinets with a light stone island, black pendant lights, and an espresso station

My wife and I are doing a kitchen renovation with a general contractor — new countertops, new sinks, and a water line plumbed in for the fancy new espresso machine. The last piece was the cabinets. Everything is stark white right now and we’re just over it. We wanted to warm it up: white oak to replace the cabinet doors, plus drawers in the lower bays so pots and pans are easier to grab.

Then we started getting quotes. Custom cabinet work came in at $10,000 and ran as high as $20,000 depending on how custom we wanted to go.

That’s when my wife said: why don’t you just do it?

Some background

I’m a software engineer — an engineer at heart — who picked up woodworking as a hobby during COVID and studied under the illustrious Steve Ramsey on YouTube. I got really into it, learned the fundamentals, and have been steadily leveling up ever since. There have been a lot of little projects along the way.

This is easily the biggest thing I’ve taken on. If you’ve done cabinets before, you know there are a hundred small decisions to make, and the dimensions have to be dead-on. We’re doing full overlay, so the reveals are tiny. Any imprecision and things don’t fit.

Trying Claude Code instead of SketchUp

I’m proficient in SketchUp, and normally I’d draw the whole thing up there, model it out from the front, and confirm everything fits before cutting anything.

I use AI constantly — Claude Code, Opus, the chat apps — for work and for random personal stuff. For this project I’d been asking a lot of questions in the chat UI. It holds context well, but I wanted more precision, a durable record of what I’d decided, and everything in one place.

So I figured I’d use Claude Code:

specs and notes in markdown files
a running log
actual software that verifies the design and outputs cut lists and build steps

I started the planning phase in Fable and described the problem without specifying a language or framework — deliberately. I just said: you figure it out.

What came back was a Python tool. (Python seems to be the default when you don’t ask for anything else.) A TOML file holds all the dimensions and specs, Python checks that everything fits, and the output is markdown — cut list and bill of materials included.

From markdown files to something I can use in the shop

Markdown worked well at first. I usually prefer plain text over anything else: readable, easy to see what changed. But I kept wanting to check the cut list and exact dimensions while I was standing in the shop, on my phone, without walking back to the laptop.

So I told it: build me a web interface and publish it. It needs to be readable and easy to navigate on a phone. And after every instruction, commit, push to GitHub, and publish the update.

Here’s what that turned into: Kitchen Reno Shop Book

I wasn’t reviewing code here. This isn’t production code, so I wasn’t scrutinizing the implementation — I needed to quality-check the numbers, not the internals. Git lets me roll back, and the artifact has its own version history. So: just ship it. It stood up an artifact hosted on claude.ai, and I never had to think about hosting at all.

The first pass was solid. A full cut list with plywood dimensions optimized to minimize waste, plus some basic 3D drawings — just boxes, nothing crazy, but useful.

What it did well

I could hand it the cabinet measurements, the door measurements, tell it I wanted full overlay with 2-inch face frames, all the boring dimensions — then talk through what I wanted, what wood, what sizes. It would scope the whole thing out and immediately run the math: dimensions, cut list, the works.

For this specific kind of task it was excellent. Figuring out the optimal way to cut sheets of plywood is exactly what AI should be doing. I used to use a SketchUp plugin for that, and it worked fine, but this is so much easier. Dimensional math, checking that things fit, running the verification code — great at all of it.

Publishing to a site I can pull up on my phone is the other big win. I used to just take notes in Apple Notes, which works, but having the numbers and the images right there, always current, is a real upgrade. 10 out of 10.

What it didn’t do well

The frustration was spatial reasoning. When I asked about cut procedures or how handles should be oriented, it got mixed up and didn’t really seem to know what it was talking about. It has a decent grasp of woodworking, but nowhere near the level it’s at with code. (This was mostly Opus 4.5 and 5, with the planning phase in Fable.)

I went back and forth on this more times than I can count — QA it, tell it to fix it, QA it again, tell it to fix it again. Sometimes it got hardware counts wrong. I’d say I want 30 hinges, two or three per door, and it would do it and then forget. Little things like that meant a lot of time spent checking output.

That was the bulk of my time on this project, honestly. Not QA’ing code — QA’ing output.

So did it save me time?

The jury’s still out. It might have been faster to mock the whole thing up in SketchUp, or even to work out of an Apple Note and a spreadsheet. (Excel can do the math too, to be fair.)

But this was my first attempt at working this way. On the next project I’ll know where the strengths and the weak spots are, and I expect it to go a lot faster.