Base Cabinet Door and Drawer Sizing


447Debbie
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Can someone tell me how I can ungray the drawer height.  I have ONE base cabinet that is 107" long and I want to divide it up into four sections without having to create four separate box cabinets and connecting them.  These will be custom cabinets and I need to draw them as one.  I'm sure that once I can set my drawer heights, then something else will be grayed out.  Isn't there a way where I can make all sizing available?

junk.jpg

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Yeah, that's not it.  This is crazy.  I'm just going to keep playing with.  It's like a video game.  Sometimes height is available, sometimes it is not.  In other cases, the width gets grayed out.  And it's not just on this side of the cabinet.  I believe it might have something to do with the program's logic of what takes precedence in the layout, but I don't know what that logic is.  I was able to finally get the height available, so I put in the cabinet doors below and added some more drawers to the right.  Then I decided I wanted the drawer on left a little smaller and I went back to it and the height is again grayed out.

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This looks like a bug, but here is how to make it work.

 

Select the drawer and split it Horizontally making 2 skinny drawers one above the other.

 

Now delete one of the drawers, and one of the spacers.

 

The remaining drawer will return to its original size and the height will be editable.

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This is interesting.  Right now I'm getting the sizes I want and nothing is graying out, so until something funky happens again, I'm just going to continue.  I don't think the programmers ever intended for someone to use the base cabinet as a custom base, without defining each one as its own cabinet.  This would work flawlessly if I were to convert this to four cabinets and push them together, except for the fact that the stile between the cabinets would be double width, not what one typically gets with a custom face frame.

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3 minutes ago, 447Debbie said:

It would be nice to put doors on the ends of the cabinets as well, but I have not figure out how to do that.

 

You can use a cabinet. Make it 3/4" deep so all you see is the door. Under materials, you can make parts Opening No Material too.

 

For Face frame cabinets, you can overlap them to get uniform gaps. You get extra lines in some views, but standard views are seamless.

cindyw224 2.jpg

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There may be another bug.  I took a single cabinet to illustrate the issue.

 

I wanted to set this up as a partial overlay with a 3/4" reveal.  It creates the reveal at the very top, the very bottom, and the very left and right, but not between drawers or between doors.  When you tell it to make the overlap 3/4" on a 1 1/2" face frame, when it gets to the drawers the software should probably only apply that once between drawers/doors but it's applying it to both the drawer and the door in the attached picture and thus any reveal is totally gone. I don't see a way to fix this between the doors.

I can fix the area between drawers by making the horizontal separation 2 1/4", but this isn't what size it will really be so the materials list will be wrong.  

I imagine this will get even messier when I try to set up the run of cabinets along the wall as custom with one face frame.  I think I better let the cabinet maker get the materials list so it will be accurate.  This is really a bummer.

 

 

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2 hours ago, 447Debbie said:

I can fix the area between drawers by making the horizontal separation 2 1/4", but this isn't what size it will really be so the materials list will be wrong.

 

Have you looked at a material list? The program gives you a line item for each cabinet -- no details on what it actually looks like or how it's constructed.

 

2 hours ago, 447Debbie said:

I think I better let the cabinet maker get the materials list so it will be accurate

 

Exactly. That's their job, and something they would do anyway (speaking as a cabinetmaker). 

 

As for your cabinet, is this what you want?

 

 

cindyw224 3.jpg

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I have not looked at the material list in that detail. Given what you're saying, it doesn't really matter then how I draw them in for my plan.

Yes, that's how I want the cabinet to look.  Guess I'll have to make it with two single doors instead of one double. 


I didn't know you were a cabinetmaker.  I might have to hire you.  I know you're quite a distance away from FH, but it is a fairly big job.  I've already found a CNC shop to make the doors out of my wood.  I found a shop for the drawer boxes that would use my wood, but for the drawer boxes I might just sell my wood and buy the wood that would look better with my cabinet wood.  For the drawers I can say that right now I'm sitting on 1000 board feet of red oak at 4/4.  Taking it to 3/4" would be optimum but overkill for a drawer box.  Plus, Blum glides for 3/4" are way more expensive than glides for 5/8", but you probably already know that. Hopefully I can just sell the red oak and maybe buy and use hard maple or Baltic birch for the drawer boxes, the jury is still out for what I'll use for the bottoms.  Many of my drawers will be 36" wide, so they'll need to be a little stronger than normal.  I have one that I'm planning for a pullout for my pots and pans, outside cabinet dimensions 36" wide x 30" deep.  That's going to have to be built extra heavy duty.  I haven't yet figured out that design but I'm thinking of just standing up the large pans vertically parallel to the face frame between some type of rails, and then hanging the smaller ones towards the back and also parallel to the face frame.  Not sure how easy those will be to access though.  I'm still designing.  

I plan to have my cabinets made out of my black walnut.  We'll have it kiln dried, to 5-7% MC, square it up, and get it out of the Midwest and to the dry desert as quickly as possible.  It will NOT be steamed.  Haven't figured out what to do with the sapwood yet.  If it's done artistically, it can be incorporated into the cabinets.

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I should say former cabinetmaker. My last shop was 12,000 sq ft, but that was 25 years ago.

 

Here is a short story about OPM (other peoples measurements) that happened long ago.

 

I was in a small town, so there was a good bit of walk ins with small jobs -- broken drawers, loose chair legs etc. One day a customer arrived with a load of interior shutters she wanted sized to fit her windows. She assured me she had measured carefully, and produced a list with exact dimensions for each one.

 

We agreed on a price, and she would return the following day to pick them up. I cut them as instructed, she picked them up, happy that it only took one day.

 

Several days later, she returned with one shutter in hand, and on seeing her, assumed it needed a bit more removed. 

 

"Young man, I gave you my measurements, and every shutter is wrong. The rest are in my car, what are you going to do?"

 

I calmly asked what the correct dimension should be for this shutter, she produced her list and gave me the measurement. I produced my tape measure, and the shutter measured exactly what it should. She immediately said there was something wrong with my tape, and after digging around in her purse, produced her own tape -- a cloth sewing tape. I needed to gather up other tapes and measuring instruments from around the shop to convince her that her tape was incorrect.

 

She was lucky as her measurements were long, the shutters were all too big.

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Understood.  I would never go out and say I need a 36" drawer.  I just know the nominal of the cabinet is 36".  On paper.  Not real life.  Once the place is built I planned to have the cabinetmaker do all the measuring.

 

Here is my story about cabinets.

 

I had what is my current kitchen all laid out on the drawings.  The exterior door was to be x' y" from the cabinet wall, I don't remember the exact dimensions.  I had the cabinets all drawn up, they rounded a corner, and I had lazy suzan corner base and wall cabinets with 45 deg fronts.  Everything was symmetrical on the wall cabinets.  As you know, it's not a simple feat to round a corner and get your sink centered between two wall cabinets that are the same size on each side of the sink.  Single wall cabinets that open away from the sink so you can reach right in without having to reach around a door.  Anyway, the framing crew was 4" off with the exterior door.  They measured it from the wrong wall and left me 4" short for the cabinets.  I had its datum (point from which it should be measured) from the cabinet wall, that was the important measurement, that's the measurement that was on the drawing.  There was no measurement between the door center and the outside wall, unless you did the math to find the resultant dimension.  But the resultant dimension wasn't the specified dimension.  Whatever they did, they came up 4" short.  Not a big deal, but they were And then there were the electricians that couldn't line up four can lights in a straight line, but I digress.

 

I work in the aerospace industry so I understand measurements and calibrated tape measures (yes we have them).  But, I'll never think I understand the mechanics of cabinet building enough to draw something up and specify a size.  There are too many unknowns for me, stile/rail width, door width, reveal, etc.  To get them all aesthetically correct, I'll leave that to the pros.  Maybe when the time comes you can point me in the direction of a cabinet maker.

 

I think I'll be ok having the doors and drawer boxes made elsewhere, as long as the cabinet maker specifies the sizes.  As a matter of fact, every cabinet maker I contacted told me they don't make their own doors and drawer boxes.  So, I located a couple of shops that make them on CNC machines and they both said they could use my wood.  The door maker cautioned me on the Moisture Content.  

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