I cut the remainder of the drawer pieces on my cross-cut sled. Below I'm cutting the side pieces clamped to the sled.
 

Meanwhile, I sanded all my pieces with some 180 grit paper. This process goes good but it's time consuming.
 

I talked to my daughter about the kind of finish that she wanted and narrowed it down to a satin. Now I gave this a lot of thought, spray vs. brush on clear and thought the spray would be a better choice. However, I didn't want to have the spice rack assembled when it was time to put a finish on it because some of the shelves were too close together. And there were a few deep areas that were hard to get at. Why would this matter? Well, if you've ever used spray or brush on clear, it can gather up in the corners producing sags or runs when it comes to those conditions, along with being too light in other areas.

What I decided to do is use spray clear and coat each piece while it was disassembled. However, I didn't want the finish on the ends or in the dowel holes. To make sure these areas stay clean, I placed some scrap pieces at the ends. This worked out well and I only coated one side per day to make sure it was dry before turning them over to coat the other side. I used two coats per side.
 

The pieces that you see below are to mask/cover the dowel hole areas before I apply any clear spray to any of my existing pieces. This is to make sure that when I do my glue-up that I have virgin wood so the glue can do it's magic. I also have two different lengths here because I have two board sizes, depending on which piece I'm working on.
 

Here you can see how the dowel holes and the area between them have been masked. This area is where a shelf or some other piece will come in contact with it. These didn't take long to make and they seem to work pretty good.
 

Assembly Step 1

It's been months up to this point but we're get'n close now and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I made sure to dry fit everything one more time before I did any gluing because I didn't want to run into any problems halfway through. I mean, gluing anything together can be stressful, especially many pieces like I'm doing here, so I'm making sure things fit correctly now. Also, I didn't paint myself into a corner. In other words, I had to make sure I didn't get ahead of myself and attach something that I shouldn't have.

With that being said, there will be four steps for my glue-up process. First I'll be working at the top, which includes the cubby-holes and small bottle shelves (arrows). While I had everything looking good during my dry fit, I tightened the small bottle shelf down tight. Then I took apart everything around it and applied glue to all the interior surfaces including the dowels, but not any of the outer pieces. I used a small brush to apply the glue with which worked very well. Once everything was clamped in place, I also tightened the screws to all those pieces as well. I did this process for each step below.
 

Second, I dry fit all the remaining pieces, inserted the small purple heart piece into the slots (no glue here) and then tightened the six screws for the vertical pieces. Next I removed the surrounding pieces and glued the dowels on the four small bottle shelves first, but only the edges that were against the oil bottle side pieces (inside arrows). The four yellow clamps are keeping pressure on the glue joints while the two red clamps are keeping the sides from moving.
 

Third, was the long top and bottom pieces (arrows). And just as before I applied glue to the dowels and wood surface around them. The bottom area consists of three pieces, two long ones and the short drawer separator. Then I used two large clamps going horizontal and two going vertical to keep things held in place.
 

The last step was to attach both of the side pieces. Now each side piece has seven sets of dowels (14 holes per side) so I dabbed glue into each shelf hole first and then inserted all the dowels like you see below. Next I applied some glue in each dowel hole on the side pieces along with a few more dabs between each hole. Finally I wiggled the side pieces into place making sure everything looked right.
 

Here you can see I used a clamp at most of the glue joints to make sure there was even pressure at each one. Once all the clamps were in place, I screwed in five screws per side pieces (arrows) and tightened all the screws. I did this same procedure for all the other steps above as well. Now it's time to work on the drawers and do some sanding.