This is a new type of post. It is a premonition of an impending Saga. I foresee the beginning of Cabinet Saga.

Don’t misunderstand me. This might be a good Saga, and it’s one I’m genuinely excited to get started on. We’re finally getting round to decorating the living room, you see, and since our house is Edwardian and the living room is the one place with some surviving period detail, we’re doing what we can to restore it to its former glory. I’ve fixed the missing bits of plaster coving and the original window frames. We’re going to find a cast iron fire surround like the one the house would originally have had. And we’re also going to put bookshelves and cabinets into the alcoves on either side of the chimney.

Turns out alcove cabinets are not cheap. It’s just a bookcase, and yes, a Billy bookcase would be very cheap. But if you want a Billy bookcase that is built in, custom-made to fit your house’s charmingly non-straight Edwardian architecture, with detailing that would fit in with the carefully restored features of an Edwardian room, and also ideally has hidden LED under-shelf lighting, that’s not economical. Ikea don’t do it. You have to get a joiner to come in and price it up, and then he quotes you a figure that makes you sit down and concentrate on breathing and dab tears from your eyes, and then when you’ve collected yourself you ask him to leave and never come back.

Luckily there’s an alternative. You can measure every conceivable dimension of your Edwardian alcoves to the millimetre – several times, until you’re really sure you’ve definitely got it right – and then send them off to a company who will design them and supply you with a flat-pack kit of heavy duty MDF parts for you to assemble and install yourself. The cost of this still causes a sharp intake of breath but is much more affordable.

So it was that in March we measured parts of our living room over and over again to pin down its every millimetre, and so it came to pass that on Wednesday a van arrived at our house and unloaded an industrial quantity of precision-cut, pre-drilled MDF.

I’ve been on nights this week, which is not prime DIY territory, but I’m off work all next week and it will be cabinet time. I can’t wait for cabinet time. I like building things – flat pack furniture, Lego, raised beds in the garden, anything really – and this is a big thrilling building project where I get to make something intricate and impressive without having to do the difficult woodwork bits.

This could just be sheer enjoyment from start to finish, but the potential for an impending Saga arises from the need for “scribing”.

Built in furniture, you see, has to be built in to the room. As in, fit it perfectly. Meet it seamlessly. And no amount of millimetre-perfect measuring can achieve that. Instead, wherever your MDF meets the wall, you need to scribe it. Hold it perfectly in position and then trace the outline of the wobbly plasterwork and the skirting board and the extra bit under the skirting board that covers the edge of the laminate floor and whatever else is in the way. Then you need to get your jigsaw out, with its splinter guard on and its high precision fine cutting blade, and cut strips off the MDF pieces you’ve just paid an arm and a leg for. Thin strips. Really precise strips. Really thin, precise strips with awkward shapes and fiddly bits that you need to get right first time on a piece of wood that can’t easily be replaced.

I might be brilliant at scribing. I hope I am. But I’ve never done it before, and there’s going to be quite a lot of it in this project, so while I’m going to have a lot of very enjoyable DIY time ahead of me I’m slightly apprehensive about the potential for it to become a Cabinet Saga.

I’ll keep you updated.