Building Drawers And Cabinets

If you re using dimensional lumber you ll just go to first size that is under 1 of your opening.

Building drawers and cabinets.

I like to use plywood to build my drawers because then i don t have to worry about twisted or warped boards causing me issues with alignment. Overlaps on the sides let you fine tune the cabinet width during installation. The sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible. This means some extra building work and buying more slides but the smaller rollouts will operate more smoothly and easily.

Attach the drawer slides to the drawer box and the cabinet frame. Read this post to understand more about choosing inset or overlay doors. If the cabinet is more than 30 in. Wider shelves and drawers tend to bind or rack as you slide them in and out.

The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. Wide consider installing two narrower rollouts side by side rather than a single wide one. Face frames cover plywood edges. Attach the drawer face leaving 1 8 gap on all sides using wood glue and finish nails and clamp it well.

For the sake of showing you how to build a simple cabinet drawer we ll be talking about attaching an overlay drawer front. Although i am using a kreg jig to build this drawer the basic principles are the same using any other joinery method. The word drawer followed by dados and dovetails is surly enough to scare off many a diyer. For this drawer my opening was 7 1 8 wide so i subtracted 1 1 8 and made my drawers 6 tall.

Inset drawers are more difficult because of the precision required to get perfect lines around the drawer front. Begin with the right cabinet dimensions. How to use a kreg jig. Also i make all my drawers using plywood for the box and plywood for the bottom.