My experience with furniture design. Issues and challenges.

Last year I needed a shoe cabinet in the hallway. I did not plan to design furniture, so at first I looked for a ready-made one on the Internet. Unfortunately, there was no one that would fit in terms of dimensions. That's why I came up with the idea to design a shoe rack myself. In the end, it's not so difficult, but mostly it was interesting to try my hand at a new field. Not having any experience in designing furniture, I started googling. Before that, I had already heard that there are companies that cut chipboard according to drawings. I had the most feedback about the Viyar company, and the winning trump card in the search was a large number of training videos from Viyar.

I was already engaged in 3D modeling in the SketchUp program, so I decided to continue designing furniture in it. It is very convenient that it has a free web version that has a basic set of design tools. The first problem on my way was - how to import the project file from SketchUp into "Viyar"? SketchUp provides an opportunity to get the view of the bedside table in an assembled state, but it must be divided into separate boards (parts). The second problem is the joins. Without any experience, it is very easy to screw up the holes. The solution was found: "Viyar" developed a plug-in for SketchUp, which allows you to add confirmats (special screws for furniture), pins, and other elements to the model with the mouse in 1 click. In addition, the plugin allows you to break the assembled model into separate parts and save them as a project acceptable for "Viyar". All this can be done manually, but the plugin saves a lot of time. Next, the following problem awaited me - the web version of the SketchUp program does not support plugins in general. Therefore, I installed a 30-day trial version of SketchUp (twice).

Excited by the success of the shoe rack, I decided to design something more complex. For a long time I wanted to order a bathroom cabinet in the niche above the toilet. After investigation, I found several options on the Internet. I came to the conclusion that I want a cabinet with 4 doors. To be honest, before arriving at the final design, I redesigned the project three times (just like this article). I will certainly start with the main jambs that I made so that you can avoid them:

1. I made the cabinet monolithic, instead of making it a three-piece assembly. On the one hand, monolithic structures are more rigid, but on the other hand, production price is higher, because drilling holes in large slabs of plywood is more expensive. They are more difficult to transport and install. It is better to divide the cabinet into sections, and then connect them with sectional ties. It also gives you some wiggle room if you mess up with the measurements. If you have curved walls, it will hide the flaws.
   

2. I added 4 hinges (in Europe it's called concealed cup hinges) for each door. I thought that the more hinges, the more reliable it is, but in fact it's not true. The more of them you add, the more rigedy get the door and the more harder to open it. There is an article on the Viyar company website where you can calculate the number of hinges base on you detail (door) sizes. I had to redo the door and decreased the number of hinges to 2.
   

3. I used tir-on mechanism that is installated inside the chipboard. It is short. But the main problem is that it does not open the door full wide, but only the length of the rod. In order for the door to open wider, you need to either buy special hinges with a spring or a hydraulic retractor. The second jamb with hinges.

4. The door must rest against the sidewall of the cabinet. Since I have only 1 wall between the sections, I had to buy special hinges as well, because 2 doors overpalled each other. The third jamb with hinges.

5. I couldn't find any adequate information about the gaps between the doors and sidewall, so I decided to put a gap of 5 mm, because it didn't seem like much to me. Despite the fact that the gaps can be partially adjusted with hinges by turning specific cog, still the gap remained too large.
   

6. Before sending the project, measure all the dimensions again, because once I made a mistake in the calculations. I had to reorder incorrect parts. It's good that I had a lot of leftover plywood.

Despite all these shortcomings, I still managed to achieve a good result. I really appreciated how the led lighting affects the appearance of the furniture, especially if there are some white elements. I also had to struggle a bit with connecting the electricity to the cabinet.

I must mention that I also had some difficulties with the Viyar company itself.

1. The UI of the ViyarPro allows you to add a chipboards, as well as holes and an edge, but the functionality of the constructor is very outdated. It is not obvious where the front and back side of the item is, so in one board I made holes on the wrong side.
2. "Viyar" has a list of leftovers of different sizes. The list is simply saved as an Excel file, which must be downloaded and opened locally. For a small shoe cabinet, leftovers are a good option, but for larger projects, you need to buy a whole sheet. The ViyarPro by default adds the whole sheet of plywood. You can manually enter the id of leftover, and its size will be added to the constructor. This is very inconvenient, given that the system knows what the leftovers are, but cannot pull the list into the constructor. If your item goes beyond the the measurment of the leftover, the constructor does not give you any error, but adds a whole new sheet of plywood.
3. I created an order in the ViyarPro.  Then I received an email: "Thank you for the order, our manager will contact you within the next 8 working hours." Out of all four orders, the manager never contacted me. I constantly had to call myself. I suspect that this is due to the fact that when placing an order, I always chose "Payment on the website", and the main role of the manager is simply to confirm the payment. Although in fact the manager should review the project, offer some additional services, or at least clarify the delivery details.
4. There is even more issues with payment. The next day I received 2 emails: specification for the project and list of accessories. Each of these letters has 3 PDF files. I need to go to the second file, scroll to the second page, scan the QR code, and then the payment page opens. I didn't know that. The email itself didn't say anything either. So I wasted 2 weeks waiting for a manager to contact me and confirm the order. The payment was not made and the manager instead of contacting me and asking why, simply canceled and deleted the order.
5. You cannot repeat an order that was previously created. If you created an order, you need to download the export file before sending it for processing? to have a backup, because after the order has been processed, it is deleted. I suspect the Viard company is doing this on purpose to insure if they make the misstakes to blame the user.
6. The rest of the material must be taken away, otherwise the company will simply dispose of it or appropriate it. There is no way to sell own leftover to the company even at half price.
7. If you chose self-pickup, you need to wait until you receive an SMS about readiness. There is a link to the barcode in the SMS. You should show the barcode to the girl in the warehouse. If you do not have a smartphone or the Internet, you will not receive a barcode. In this case, you need to go to the ticket office with your passport, but the ticket office closes at 18:00. In addition, there is no information about the order neither in the SMS nor on the page with the barcode. If you have several orders, it is very easy to get confused in these SMS. By the way, I didn't get lucky quite often. In the evening, when Kyivstar was hacked, I came to the warehouse to pick up the order, I realized with horror that I could not open the link from the SMS, because there is Internet on my cellphone.
8. The accessories are moved to a separate order and can go to another warehouse, because the manager did not call you back and did not specify which warehouse to send the accessories to.
9. It is not mentioned anywhere, but it turns out that chipboard cutting is carried out both in Lviv and in Kyiv. However, some services, such as, for example, edge cutting at an angle of 45 degrees, or processing of large-sized parts are performed only in Kyiv. This significantly increases the order delivery time and cost. If you have a leftover, to which you also need to make a 45-degree edge, you need to take it back to Kyiv, and then again to Lviv. Such a trip costs more than the leftover itself.

Despite all the troubles, I finally finished the furniture project in the bathroom and toilet. I think if I wasn't working in IT, I could easily start my career in furniture design. I would like to summarize all the advantages and disadvantages of designing and constructin furniture by myself.

Pros:

1. If you have a computer and the Internet, it is very easy to learn to design furniture yourself.
2. You can make furniture in non-standard niches, where ready-made furniture from furniture stores is not suitable.
3. It is cheaper compared to custom furniture from design company.
4. It develops spatial thinking and creativity.
5. Designing your own furniture allows you to get non-standard, unique products.

Cons:

1. It is still more expensive than some mass-produced furniture in a furniture store.
2. If you are designing something large furniture and especially if you choose to use different colored chipboards, you will always have a very large amount of scraps left over. But you have to pay for the whole slab. It is a pity to throw away left overs, and there is no place to store them.
3. When starting any business, a person usually makes a lot of mistakes. In this area, the error is a damaged chipboard. For example, the projects of the bathroom and toilet cabinets cost me UAH 19,860. This includes the price of three slabs of chipboard that cost UAH 8,961 in total. Which is about 50% of the projects costs. The scraps and left overs is about 45 % of all slabs.

Learn from my mistakes and try not to repeat them.