Ryan's

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How to Build Drawer Boxes

Drawer boxes for your cabinet is a place where you can keep it simple with pocket screws or brad nails or flex your skills a little and try for some joinery like dovetails or box joints. After much messing around making and buying various jigs for the router and table saw, we settled on box joints for our project. This provides a nice professional looking feature to your build, but it also adds time to the process. Step 01. Determine...

How to Build Cabinet Doors and Drawers

A cabinet door is just a much larger cabinet drawer face. We built our cabinet doors and drawers from 2-1/2 inch poplar with 1/4-inch baltic birch panels. This combination did not create any flex in the panel when installing drawer pulls. This post will show you how to create professional looking doors and drawer faces. Before cutting commences, there are some sizing considerations to work through: #01. How much overhang will the hinges have and how close will the doors...

How to Calculate Undermount Drawer Slide Lengths

Determining the right size drawer slides can be tricky the first time – especially if you want the drawer slides ready to go as your building and not hold up your project. Here are simple methods for calculating your drawer slide lengths for overmount and flush mount drawers. Project Considerations and Measurements You’ll Need #01: Determine if your cabinet will have a back panel. Usually a 1/4-inch piece. #02: Make the decision to use under-mount drawer slides (I’ll show you...

How to Install Undermount Drawer Slides the Easy Way

Undermount drawer slides are the way to go! This post will show you the simple method to mount your drawer slide hardware, get it into position perfectly level, and move on to building your drawer to fit it properly. Before you begin, make sure that you check out How to calculate the size of under-mount drawer slides that you need. Step 01: Cut Rear Bracket Mounting Pieces Rather than doing some fancy complicated yoga moves while you try to measure...

How to Build a Cabinet Carcass

Building a custom cabinet is a rewarding project that is possible without an expensive tool shop. This post walks through the first step in building your custom cabinet – the carcass. There are three things that when we started this project that I wish my research had enlightened me on: #01: How to size the carcass. #02: How to calculate the drawer mount hardware length. #03: How does the door overhang on hinges impact the door and drawer placement. Read...

DIY Custom Closet – Update Your Bifold Doors

We created a custom built-in closet in our hallway to replace our boring bifold doors and it turned out fantastic – we eliminated those pesky bifold doors and ugly wire racks. We built custom box-joint drawers with mortise and tenon face frames and built-in shelves. All of this using affordable tools and picking up skills along the way. We’ll show you how we did it with tips and tricks, including ways to flex your woodworking skills if you so desire...

How to Build a Dado Sled

A table saw is a fantastic tool and with a simple “sled”, it can be safer and easier to make some great furniture pieces. We built a simple sled to test our skills at creating box joints and eventually doors and drawer faces. Here you’ll find some tips and tricks to build your own Table Saw Dado Sled. Halfway through a recent project, our first table saw gave up the ghost – as you can see, we have simple contractor-style...

How to Create a Box Joint Jig

Box joints add flair to your cabinet boxes and give them a professional look. It’s relatively easy to make a simple box joint jig that clamps to a Dado sled and get great looking and consistent results. Some Useful Tools to Help with this Build – Digital Calipers and Setup Blocks Here’s how we built ours! 1. Determine the Size of the Box Joints. We used 1/2-inch. We bought a fancy Diablo dado set and put on the correct combination...

Happy Tree

How to Prune Fruit Trees

A couple of years ago we started trimming our fruit trees – we have two apple trees, two cherry trees, and one pear tree. The result was a significant increase in our haul! Way more apples for Nichole’s famous pies. And a couple of 5-gallon buckets worth for friends, neighbors, or this year it seemed our bobcat friends. We even had a bear that was climbing the fence to eat a few pears and take a wee nap in our...

How to Create a Wood Accent Wall

We have always had an “accent” wall in our son’s room. Even when we repainted his room to create the Star Wars Boys Room, we kept a wee accent. A recent overhaul of our daughters room and some need for balance between siblings gave us the idea to punch it up — and having a bunch of free wood that Nichole found on our local marketplace that was begging to be made into something. We drew many options of what...