Building Drawers And Cabinets

Begin with the right cabinet dimensions.

Building drawers and cabinets.

If you re using dimensional lumber you ll just go to first size that is under 1 of your opening. The 3 4 plywood case eliminates panel jointing planing and glue ups. For this drawer my opening was 7 1 8 wide so i subtracted 1 1 8 and made my drawers 6 tall. Face frames cover plywood edges.

A whole lot of making installing and building drawers is making sure things are lined up and square. This means some extra building work and buying more slides but the smaller rollouts will operate more smoothly and easily. Wide consider installing two narrower rollouts side by side rather than a single wide one. Also i make all my drawers using plywood for the box and plywood for the bottom.

The word drawer followed by dados and dovetails is surly enough to scare off many a diyer. Attach the drawer face leaving 1 8 gap on all sides using wood glue and finish nails and clamp it well. Attach the drawer slides to the drawer box and the cabinet frame. 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. Inset drawers are more difficult because of the precision required to get perfect lines around the drawer front. 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 sample base and wall cabinets shown below have these features to make building them as simple as possible. Nonetheless there s an easier way to build a drawer without using a table saw or router yet results in a beautiful sturdy assembly just the same. Read this post to understand more about choosing inset or overlay doors. I m building these drawers for my diy dresser.