Building Inset Cabinet Drawers

Building and fitting a fine drawer like this is a hallmark of craftsmanship and provides a lifetime of pleasurable use.

Building inset cabinet drawers. Notice the drawers are inset because they set inside the front of the cabinet. Inset drawers give a modern clean look to your furniture projects while speaking volumes about your craftsmanship. For the sake of showing you how to build a simple cabinet drawer we ll be talking about attaching an overlay drawer front. Building a dresser is a great project to take on with lots of skills to master.

This tip works great for wood cabinets dressers nightstands tables and anything. Building kitchen cabinet doors is doable but can be tricky. The top drawer of this desk is inset with a frame notice it is surrounded on all sides by a frame. There are a couple reasons that inset drawer fronts can be intimidating.

And if you have a bunch to build you ll need a lot of clamps and even more space. Btw if you don t have a combination square get one. It sometimes requires powerful and expensive wood shaping equipment. But the reveals the gaps around the drawers tend to highlight minor alignment discrepancies.

In this article i ll describe how to fit inset drawers where the entire drawer including its front is enclosed by the cabinet. Learn how to make and install inset cabinet doors and drawers. The last step in how to make drawers is adding false drawer fronts to the boxes. Build the cabinets buy the doors.

But there are two main options to choose from. Inset drawers fit inside the drawer opening as you can see on my diy daybed with storage drawers. Unless you have unlimited free time consider building your cabinets but buying your doors. The bottom drawers are inset without a frame notice that the cabinet does have a face frame but the individual drawers are not individually framed.

The fronts of overlay drawers overlap the cabinet face frame to hide those misalignments. When you open it the vacuum sucks all other drawers inward. Inset drawers are more difficult because of the precision required to get perfect lines around the drawer front. One of the aspects of building a dresser that many woodworkers find intimidating is to build inset drawer fronts which can be a distinctive accent to a dresser or cabinet project.

Wood magazine s jeff mertz takes you through the steps to create perfectly spaced inset drawer. Installing inset drawers on faceframe cabinets the easiest way to measure how thick your cleats fillers blocks need to be is to use a ruler or combination square.