 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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Size to fitThe beauty of building your own cabinets is that you’re not locked into these dimensions.They can still serve as a guide, but you can vary them to fit your particular needs. For example, you can vary heights and widths to easily work around strange door and window configurations. A shorter base cabinet puts the counter at a height that makes kneading and rolling out dough easier for bakers.
While some manufacturers now offer “universal design” cabinets that accommodate persons...
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If you build your own cabinets, you’re not limited to materials. Another advantage is being able to select and match grain pattern and color. Manufacturers can’t afford to spend time doing this. Instead, grain patterns are random and they use a toner to give the wood a uniform color and appearance.
The materials used commercially for cabinet carcases, drawer boxes, shelves, and interior divider panels can vary widely. Usually, at least some of these parts are made from vinyl-covered...
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Obviously, you can’t just start building kitchen cabinets without extensive planning. While we don’t have room to address those issues here, we can steer you in the right direction. Some of the best information on kitchen layout and design that I found was published by kitchen cabinet manufacturers. The free brochures at home centers contain checklists of what to consider: appliance sizes, utility locations, and the types of activities and features that are important to you. They provide...
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Unless you’re independently wealthy, there’s a limit on how much you can spend for store-bought (stock) cabinets. The typical approach is to pick out what you like, then whittle away at the extras to stay within budget.
But suppose you could spend that same amount on materials. By discounting the labor (after all, this is time spent in the shop), you can keep some of those extras and upgrade the materials and improve the quality. I found this out first-hand with this kitchen project. |
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Building Kitchen Cabinets
