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 be together.
#02. How much space will there be between the doors and drawers.
01. Cut Your Boards to Width and Length
For our project, we decided on poplar at 2-1/2 inches wide. It would have been great to have jointed the boards, but we weren’t there on our shop set up yet so we purchased pre-surfaced wood from a local woodshop. Now it’s time to cut-to-length – the stiles and the rails.
Cutting Stiles: the stiles are the pieces that form the sides – running vertically. Their length is the height of the drawer and door you are building. You need two for each drawer or door. Mark the boards with an “S”.
Cutting Rails: the rails are the top and bottom pieces – running horizontally. Their length is the width of the drawer subtracted by the width of the two rails and plus 1.5 inches (for the tenons). For example, on a 22-inch drawer with 2.5-inch wide stiles (5 inches for both), the rail cut would be 18.5 inches (to account for two 3/4-inch tenons). Mark the boards with an “R”.
02. Cut Your Mortises
Mortise is a fancy word for a groove. We swapped our blade for a dado stack on the table saw. The mortise will serve two purposes, it will hold the panel and accept the tenon that gets cut into the rails.
Using a test piece, we got the groove as close to the center as possible and made sure it was 3/4-inch deep. The width of the groove is set by your panel material which is for our project was 1/4-inch. To make sure that all boards were cut with the same reference, we held the “R” or the “S” against the fence. facing outward from the fence.
03. Cut Your Rail Tenons
We pulled out the dado sled to help with this part and put on a wider dado stack, which isn’t a necessity. Using the test piece we set the dado height to remove the material up to the mortise groove. In theory, this is a 1/4 inch if you got your 1/4 groove perfectly centered. Our’s was off by 1/16-inch which matters for a snug tenon fit. Again, we started with the reference letter R face down because the groove wasn’t perfectly centered (you do not cut the stiles). We cut both sides of the rail without flipping it over.
Next, we slightly adjusted the dado height to remove the perfect amount from the other side leaving a 1/4-inch tenon.
04. Cut The Panels
We used 1/4-inch baltic birch for our panels. The panels were cut so that their width and height fit into the mortises of the rails and stiles. For our custom closet project with 2-1/2 inch wide rail and stiles, our panel is 3-1/2 inches narrower and shorter than our door and drawer.
05. Assemble and Prep for Paint
Prior to gluing, we made sure that everything test fit correctly and kept the “Rs” and “Ss” facing outward. We double-checked everything with a tape measure to make sure it still matched our intended project size. Once confident everything fit, we applied the glue and clamps and double-checked our measurements as we went. Once the glue was dry, we sanded to perfection.
There you have it – doors and drawers!
