If you’ve dreamed of building a kitchen full of cabinets, stop dreaming and start building. Here’s what you need to know to get custom results for half what stock cabinets cost.
For many home woodworkers,outfitting a kitchen with handcrafted cabinets is the dream project. Who hasn’t looked at stock cabinets built with particleboard, hotmelt glue and staples and thought, “I could build something a whole lot better than this for half the money.”
And they’re right. By building your own cabinets, you can upgrade materials and construction methods. You’re also not locked into “stock” sizes. The style, look, finish, and features are completely up to you. If you think about it, cabinets are just a bunch of boxes. The only real challenge is the size of such a project. And that’s manageable as long as you know where to get started and how to proceed.
On this site, we’ll walk you through how we built these cabinets and how they compare with stock cabinets purchased from a home center. And hopefully inspire you to consider building your own.
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Wall cabinet construction
The basic construction of the wall cabinets is similar to the base units. The ¾"-thick plywood carcase sides (L) are dadoed for the bottom (M), and rabbeted for the top (N) and back (O). The main difference (besides the shallower depth) is the addition of a second nailer (P). While the floor supports the load for base cabinets, wall cabinets must support their own weight plus the weight of what you put in them.With mounting screws driven through the nailers and into the wall framing, these cabinets are rock solid. |
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 Here is the process to assemble the cabinet face frame
Add the face frames
Face frames dress up the front of the cabinet and add structural strength as well. When building face frames in the past, I’ve used dowels, biscuits,and even mortises and tenons to join the horizontal rails and vertical stiles.
The size of this project, however, was the perfect excuse to try out a new technique. I’d heard that pocket hole joinery was a quick and accurate way to assemble face frames and this project proved it. |
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Here are the details to build the base units of the kitchen cabinet and assemble them.
Building the bases
At this point, you’ve seen some of the basic considerations that went into my kitchen design. Now it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get into the actual construction. |
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Page 5 of 9 |
Building Kitchen Cabinets
