Two coats of our favorite green, to match the pieces already in the room, and we were in business. The hardest part was to minimize as much as possible getting any of the three coats (primer and 2 green) in the tracks or on the ends of the pieces because from our trial run everything fit together pretty snugly. Those four blocks in the foreground will be the feet for this cabinet.
Next up was assembly. We debated a number of options--dowel rods, nails, or screws--to hold this together. We opted for screws because they'd stay put better than nails, are easier to mask than rods, and are just as tough as dowels. Because we want to paint the whole exterior we had to make sure that we could countersink the screws a bit to plaster and paint over them. Fortunately, this is pine and not oak so we were fine.
We tried a couple configurations with clamps to see which would keep everything in place best. This worked ok but didn't close gaps between the top/bottom and sides.
Putting our long clamps along the sides worked much better to close those gaps and to make the corners as flush as we could make them. All of the inner pieces were pretty secure because of the grooves they were sitting in but we didn't want to take chances with slippage so we used some corner clamps.
There was a little trick to making sure that we drilled and screwed into the adjoining boards. An L-square was very helpful for keeping us on track. Out of the 24 holes we drilled we only missed one.
Here's what everything looked like once we finished assembly. See, clamps no longer needed! We did have to touch up with spackle all the places where boards join to close gaps or level surfaces out.
And here's the piece up on blocks to make painting easier. All of the rims, sides, and top have a coat of primer now.
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