Keith Johnson Woodworking: 8 Cabinet Details That Look Expensive (But Aren't Hard)

You don't have to be a pro cabinet maker to make cabinets like these. I'm going to show you eight details that make cabinets look expensive but aren't difficult, including custom crown made on the table saw, a two-tiered drawer, integrated led lighting, a glass panel door, and one of the three details that most people skip. All built in a 390 square foot garage with a bunch of pocket screws, some table saw joinery, and some hand tools. Pro cabinet makers would charge over 5k for this, but you can build it yourself. Before we even get started on this build, here's a money-saving tip. Find a cabinet shop that's local to you because typically they are throwing out material that is either too small for anything they'll use or it was built to the wrong size and they have no use for it. For example, my buddy's a cabinet maker and this pantry cabinet was the wrong size and they had to rip it out and build a new one. And this is essentially a full sheet of 4x8 pre-finished maple ply that I got for free. And this freebie plywood will be used to make the base cabinet of this project, represented here in Jerry's highly detailed drawing. Before we get too far in this video, I want to address that $5,000 price tag. Now I asked three pro cabinet makers in different parts of the country and they priced this project between $52,000 and $5,500. Now materials add up quick, but most of it is labor. A one-off custom cabinet project has no efficiencies. It's like building a custom piece of furniture for the first time. Cool, Jerry. There's Mr. Art Vandelay himself. One of the cool features of this base cabinet will be a push-to-open toe-kick drawer for cat food dishes. In case you didn't know, we have two cats. Now since the end panel and the face frame will go all the way to the floor, the inside faces of the plywood sides down in the toe-kick will be seen. So I'm going to pop a little white oak plywood patch in there. This is one of those details that takes a bit of time, but you don't want to look at the cabinet and see beautiful white oak everywhere and then down in the toe-kick see a couple of chunks of glossy maple ply. A little sanding will clean that up. Now we can start popping this base cabinet together. The construction and assembly is super simple. Just screws. No glue. No dados. It's just not necessary. I used to think it was, but after spending a lot of time with professional cabinet makers, I realized I was building cabinets too much like furniture. Now if you have a CNC that's cutting out all of your parts, it definitely makes sense to add that joinery because it makes assembly that much faster. Especially on a huge run of cabinets versus a single upper and lower like we're doing here. So I'm edge banding those with hardwood with some super strong double-sided pressure sensitive tape. So rather than flushing up these stretchers with the cabinet box, I have a line here that is a four millimeter setback, which is the exact setback for my drawer slides. Now that green tape up the side of the cabinet, that's for drawer layout. The bottom two drawers are the same size and the top one is a little shallower. Those marks set my stretcher locations and give me the drawer box sizes to order. Yes, I said order. And we'll go over the cost for ordering them when they arrive. Yeah, there you go. Stretch it out. I'm gonna pull a hammy. Now this is specialty three-quarter inch plywood, but it's a little different. It's a plywood core, but then there's an eighth inch layer of MDF on each side and then it's covered with hardwood veneer. The MDF gives a super smooth finish for the veneer to adhere to so you don't get any bubbles or voids. The downside? That MDF makes that sheet about 50% heavier. Hence my near hernia throwing it up on the bench. Now the bottom plywood edges of the sides and the back of the cabinet won't necessarily be seen, but I'm still covering those up with some eighth inch thick white oak edge banding. And for the custom crown molding at the top, here's what I've come up with. So it's basically a flat modern crown. Now I'll show you how to make it. All right, here's the sequence of cuts for this. First we'll cut this little shoulder here, then we'll turn it vertically, cut this at a 12 degree bevel, and finish with this little shoulder here. Now to cut this giant bevel, it did take several passes, inching the blade up a little bit each time. A little sanding and it will be ready for finish. Now that I know the height of my crown, which is three inches, I know I want a face frame reveal at the top of inch and a half. Now I know where I can set my top cabinet component. And to make sure I'm evenly spaced from the left and the right side, just made these little spacer blocks. I got one clamped in over here. I'm gonna clamp this one here. And this little backer piece will allow me to attach the crown molding from the inside. These I will put in with pocket screws so there are no screws showing on the inside face. Now this is just a dry fit of the upper cabinet because it will be broken down to pre-finish the interior, route the grooves for the LEDs, and drill the shelf pin holes, which are all much easier on flat panels rather than an assembled cabinet. And I can size my face frame and door while it's assembled. And this hole is for the 24 volt wires for the LEDs so I can give the location to the electrician. All right, so I resaw these pieces of veneer for the end panels. I didn't film it because, trust me, it wasn't exciting. So run these through the drum sander, get them a little thinner, then we can veneer. Now if you don't have the ability to resaw or a drum sander to run the veneers through, you can buy veneers at different thicknesses through places online like certainlywood.com or you can use narrower boards and rip them vertically on the table saw. That would be my recommendation because I like to use the same wood that I'll be cutting my rails and stiles from for grain and color consistency. So this will be the end panel for the upper cabinet and then this the end panel for the lower cabinet. Now the half inch substrate that I'm using is leftover from one of my previous projects. It's half inch MDF with walnut veneer on one side and some kind of random oak on the other. What? I smell the same. Oh dude. All right, this contact cement is pretty toxic and I didn't really want to see Jerry all hemped up on goofballs so I've taken this operation outside. Unfortunately the rain moved in so I had to take it undercover. Now if you've never used contact cement before, you only get one shot. Once one piece sticks to another, that's it. There's no moving it. So the trick is to place some sticks underneath and then remove them as you work in sections, applying sufficient pressure with a j-roller or a roller or a veneer scraper like I have here. Now the reason I was using contact cement on this is because if you use any kind of water-based glue, it's going to introduce moisture to one side of the panel and cause it to warp or cup. And since there was no need to veneer both sides of this panel, I thought contact cement was the best solution. And with the veneer applied to my panels, it was time for the arduous process of going through all of my lumber and picking out the best grain match and color for my rails and styles, for the face frames, for the panels, and also for my drawer fronts. This is a process you do not want to rush. You want the entire piece to look cohesive and well thought out, not like you just grab random boards off the shelf. Now for the glass door of the upper cabinet, I'm cutting the rails and styles of that door as well as the rails and styles for the face frame from the same piece. That way the door matches the face frame around it, or at least as close as possible. I'm going to pause this cut so you can see that the face frame will be taken from the same piece as the door rail. That way when they sit on top of each other, they match and look continuous. And the same go with the miter wrapped corners. Those comprise the face frame on the front and wrap around to be the frames of the side panels. We want those to be from the same piece. And to take that one step further, the veneer was cut from the same boards as the rails and styles of those panels for grain and color consistency. These are some of the details I think that really separate low-end cabinetry with high-end cabinetry. And it's 100% free. It only costs you a little extra time with your material planning. Okay, now we have our parts kind of roughed out. This is the end panel for the base cabinet. We have our bottom rail. We have our right style that will go up against the wall and get scribed. Our top rail. And then this is our style that was mitered that will meet the miter of the face frame that goes on the front of the cabinet. This is the end panel for the upper cabinet. This will be our style that goes up against the wall and gets scribed. And then the same thing here as the base cabinet. We have a miter meeting a miter that goes onto the front. I like to use packing tape because it stretches. And you can see through to see if your miter is tight or not once you get some glue on there. So now we just fold it up, stir some tape around, and that's our clamp. Now I'm just going to burnish this corner just a little bit. Better to do this when the glue is wet. We're not rounding this over, just applying light pressure. This will fill any gaps that might be there by pushing the wood fibers into the glue before it dries. Now if you've watched any of my videos, you know I obsess over details like this to get things as perfect as I can. Now I also have a minor obsession with my morning coffee. This is Trade. Roasted to order coffee tailored to your flavor profile. Caramel date and dark chocolate. Yeah, I have a bit of a sweet tooth. After a quick quiz, Trade matches you with different coffees from local roasters across the country and roasts them to order and ships them to you fresh, one at a time. There are 55 specialty roasters you won't find on the grocery shelf. I love trying different coffees rather than the same thing every day. Variety, people! And right now, Trade is offering a discovery trial. Three bags from three roasters with your first bag free at drinktrade.com slash keith or scan that QR code. Now coffee purists will shudder as I use my espresso machine and just keep pushing the button until I get a full cup of coffee. It's my version of an americano. An amerikitho, if you will. Hmm. Caramelly. Chocolatey. Robust. Like I know what I'm talking about. It's good though. Definitely gonna need another cup of that. That stairs so squeaky. That one too. Jerry, take care of that. Quit stalling. Let's move it. Now I need to cut a groove in these rails and stiles. That way this panel can get recessed. The best way to do this would have been to glue this up and then come around with a rabbiting bit. Unfortunately, a little case of cart before the horse and I glued up this miter and now the router can't get deep into that corner. Now fortunately this isn't glued up but I will have to cut these grooves individually and then glue everything together. But I don't want to use one of these bits because I'm afraid of tear out. I have a lot of grain direction changing in different spots so instead I'm going to do this with a table saw. And when I do that the grooves are going to go all the way through so I'm going to have to come back and put a little patch in. Not a big deal. Now you certainly don't need a dado stack to do this operation. You could use your single blade and just make several passes or you could do it at the router table. I suggest making that first pass very very light which creates a score cut and should prevent the tear out I mentioned earlier the deeper that you go. Now cutting the groove on this mitered corner can get a little tippy so make sure you apply sufficient pressure against the fence and down on the table as you push forward. A big push block like this does help. And I cut some little filler blocks to glue in there. These don't have to match grain or color because they won't be seen. Okay pocket holes are drilled. I got the little glue blocks back in there for when the dado stack took that material out that we had to back fill. Now everything's clamped up dry no glue so I can take a measurement for my actual panel. This is 17 and three quarter by just under 28. Now I do have a confession to make. So when this veneer was glued to the MDF substrate I wasn't able to get a line of glue where these two pieces of veneer came together. So what happened after a day or so that veneer separated and a gap opened up maybe a 30 second but obviously still very noticeable. So what I did was I took this panel of the table saw ripped it right down the middle then I was able to get a full bead of glue toe to tail that covered the MDF and that eighth inch thick veneer on top clamped it all together and everything came together perfectly. And now we can cut this panel of confession to size. Now the veneer I cut on this larger panel was a little thick so as you can see it sits a little proud of my frame. So I ran it through the drum sander a couple times to get it flush with the frame. The upper panel was actually fine because that veneer was a little thinner to start with. And alas we could finally get these mitered corners and end panel frames glued up. Ah the sweet sound of pocket screws. And here's Jerry trying to take out my Achilles in three, two, one. What is going on back here? You scared the **** out of me. Get a cat they said. They pretty much keep to themselves. So I'm using Rubio Smoke 5% on this because at the other end of the kitchen is where I did a built-in desk in window seat years ago in that exact same color. So I'm just keeping things consistent. And with this finish a little goes a long way and it is the most durable hard wax oil finish I have ever used. I've been using it for almost 15 years but man it is a workout rubbing this finish in and then wiping off the excess. At this point you might have noticed there are some worm holes in this white oak. I tried to work around it but a few here and there adds a little character. Delivery day. Drawers. Oh yeah. Beautiful dovetail drawers with notches cut for the slides. Holes for the little tab thingy in the back. Solid maple three-eighths. Baltic birch bottoms. UV coating. Now this one you'll notice has a flush bottom. There's no notches. No holes. We're going to do something special with this one now. And free cat enrichment packaging. Jerry. All right the toe kick drawer. This is just like installing any other drawer. However you can't mount the slides too low to the ground otherwise you won't be able to get your fingers under there to access the locking devices. I learned that one the hard way. I recommend mounting the slides a half inch up off the floor. The spacer block ensures the same depth and height of the left and right slide. A typical toe kick is four inches deep but this is three. Otherwise the drawer wouldn't come out far enough to access what's in it. And don't forget to factor in the thickness of your drawer front. These are push to open slides but I guess in this case it's actually going to be kick to open since you'll be using your foot. So why do I buy drawers instead of building them? The maple and baltic birch plywood alone would cost me $200. The finished drawers were $371. That's before milling, glue ups, joinery, sanding, finishing and cutting for the slides. Want to build them yourself and go cheaper? Glue and brad nail plywood boxes. That's not my standard for kitchen drawers but everyone has their own budget and level of quality. So this hole here is the secret weapon for when we scribe the end panel and glue on the face frame. Okay let's get the most annoying sound of any tool out of the way and remove this baseboard so we can get this lower cabinet installed. Now we'll do the final cut of that baseboard when we have the end panel ready. Now fortunately the floor is pretty level so I didn't have to do any scribing for that. However I am using plastic shims to square up that cabinet to the refrigerator panel to the left. To cut out the baseboard for the end panel to slide into, I've screwed on a piece of stock that I milled down to the thickness of my end panel minus the thickness of my multi-tool blade. So that should give me the perfect spacing to slice down and then this to slide in with no gap. Uh Jerry, I kind of need to get in there. As you can see to scribe this to the floor there's just a little bit of a high spot right there. Now typically when making and scribing end panels like this you would leave at least a half inch on this side to be scribed in on the bottom to be scribed depending on how far out the floor and wall are. But in this case I didn't have enough material to give myself that big of a scribe but fortunately the wall is relatively plumb and as you can see the floor is relatively flat which I did check first. So I only have about an eighth of an inch extra material to be able to scribe off the bottom. Let me show you how I'm going to do that. So here is an eighth inch shim and all I'm going to do is put it on the top of my cabinet. Make sure it's flush and flush and this goes for whatever thickness scribe you are doing. And now with it even I'm going to clamp this in place so it can't move. And now I can take my shim, take my marking knife and draw a scribe line across the bottom. All right time to scribe. As you can see I'm tight to my scribe line on the end but as I get towards the middle you see some material here that needs to be cleaned up and that's that hump in the floor. All right let's check the fit. For the side here I have three sixteenths of an inch extra material to scribe off. So I'm going to take a three sixteenths spacer block, put it between my front style and the cabinet box, clamp that in place and then do the same down at the bottom. This is where the toe kick hole we drilled comes in real handy. Now back to the mag shims I have a sixteenth and an eighth that makes three sixteenths of an inch and now we can make our scribe. The floor scribe wasn't back beveled because you would see that at the front but I am back beveling this four degrees. It makes fine tuning that scribe much easier because there's less material to remove. If you don't have a track saw you can absolutely use a jigsaw for scribing. You'll have to cut from the underside to avoid any tear out that way the blade is pulling the fibers down and not up. Okay test the fit. Not happy about that gouge in the wall but the scribe looks good. And then it was time for more pocket screw pandemonium. As luck would have it the face frame for the lower cabinet was square so I could just cut my drawer fronts to size and then test the fit. All right as you can see you've got even spacing three thirty seconds all around top bottom sides now we can get these sanded get the corners rounded over and get some finish applied to the drawer fronts as well as this face frame. On second thought it's probably best to have one huge Rubio sesh all at once so let's work on the upper cabinet in its entirety and I'm using a french cleat to hang this upper cabinet because it makes it so much easier to take it off and put it back on during the course of the build now I could get this cabinet broken down and cut the channels for the leds and drill the shelf pin holes when drilling shelf pin holes for cabinets especially ones with glass doors I don't drill the holes top to bottom nobody puts a shelf way up top or way down low instead the middle hole in each set puts the two shelves at equal spacing splitting the opening into thirds with one extra hole above and below for a little adjustment in my experience these shelves rarely get moved and a small intentional set of holes just looks more custom that's it do the same thing on the other one gotta get some work done here thank you so these are the leds I'll be installing they are five millimeter cob leds so I need to route out a channel wide enough that that fits in there gets stuck down in and then this little silicone cover goes on top of that now even though the leds are only five millimeters wide I need an eight millimeter wide channel for that silicone diffuser well what red-blooded american has metric router bits so I'm gonna have to use a quarter inch and run two passes now a minor adjustment to the edge guide so I've drawn a reference line there I'm gonna move my bit over to that and then tighten it down and now make the second pass now I did this operation to the left side the right side and the bottom panel since the leds will run down over and up now just double check the fit and that's pretty good and now for that extended rubio sesh lots to do here I have all the parts for the upper cabinet then the drawer fronts and of course the face frame for the base cabinet you'll notice I taped off the inside of the face frame for this base cabinet because that will get glued to the cabinet box now we'll have to set those aside to cure while we work on other things all right now to turn this single deep drawer into a sliding double decker with this drawer and some side mount slides all right first we're going to draw a cut line across the back of the drawer that matches the height of the drawer plus a little bit more just a little safety zone which I've already specced out on my little square here now this is what we need to cut out you could absolutely do this with a jigsaw I would drill out the two corners with a drill bit so you have a place to start and turn the corner and then just clean it all up because some of you may not like raising the blade up through a piece of wood like I've done here just gives me a nice clean cut and then I just have to clean up the corners by hand I believe this is what they refer to as hybrid woodworking power tools and hand tools working together as you can see the most important part is that the drawer slides are put on the opposite that they normally would be so that the drawer opens backwards and not pulls open forwards all right so now I'm going to tip the drawer up put this in place and I'm going to set it down from the top edge of the main drawer about 3 30 seconds of an inch you could have it flush if you want and from there I'm going to make a mark at the bottom of my drawer slide here now take a measurement from the drawer bottom to that line you get just over four and three eighths now I can cut a spacer to ensure that the slides are mounted at the exact same height on both sides of the drawer now since these are 16 inch slides and our working area is just over 17 inches I'm using a one inch and a 16th inch spacer block to set the exact distance for our slides from the front edge all right Jerry you gonna help yeah we can slide this in from the back click oh yeah yeah yeah not too difficult and you can do this to any existing drawer that you have in your house if you're looking for levels in your drawers with that done we can get back to installing our end panel and our base cabinet face frame I know I sized these screws correctly but I'm still nervous about them poking through remember what I said about the veneer being cut from the same board as the I want to point out this little shadow line here the way I did that was to sand or slightly round over the inner edge on the shoulder of this frame and I'll show you how and why now this is a finished panel for the upper cabinet end panel and if that were sitting in that frame like this and everything was flat you can see how things just kind of blend in which is fine but if anything ever moves and you end up with an inconsistent reveal or a little crack here and there and especially on paint grade where you paint this and it's got a solid line and then it cracks so instead if you slightly round over the inside face of that little shoulder then you get a meaningful shadow line all the way around all right this is where things finally start to come together and all that hard work pays off and that sense of satisfaction kicks in the glue and pocket screws ensure there are no visible fasteners and no nail holes to fill this creates a beautiful high-end look without the need for any extra grooves joinery or expensive connectors and notice those toe kick holes we drilled a while back coming in clutch for clamping the bottom of the face frame I kind of wish I had kept track of how many wood screws and pocket screws I used in this it didn't seem like a lot at the time but watching this video back and doing the voiceover it seems like a lot but maybe that's because I assembled broke down and reassembled this upper cabinet a couple of times I'm definitely using glue to attach the back of the cabinet because that is what's going to give it its rigidity and really stiffen up this case it's one o'clock in the morning and Lola's a little night owl like me all right now to get the upper face frame pocket screwed together glued sanded and finished so then we can work on the door so I'm basically just getting the rest of my face frame pieces sized once everything is where it needs to be I can mark the exact position of that upper rail where it's going to hit the left and right style so I know where to secure it with pocket screws you can see I'm using a square in there just to make sure that when these are clamped together and screwed together they are actually going together square because that's pretty important in cabinetry from what I've read judging by Jerry's ears being pinned back I don't think he likes the sound of pocket screws going in with the face frame glued up I can now size the door parts and cut the joinery ultimately there will be a 3 32nd reveal on all sides but I'm sizing the parts using 1 16th inch spacers so I have a little bit to trim off after glue up the joinery will be tongue and groove now the tongue on the rails will only be a half inch long because my stock is short and with heavy glass in these doors that makes me a little nervous so I may reinforce them with dowels now I can cut the joinery at the table saw but first I mark the groove location on every piece so I don't cut it in the wrong spot oh Lola what'd you do someone ate her breakfast too fast this morning it's okay we'll clean it up you had to do it on the cast iron huh all right you can see the damage here now I'm going to show you how to get this cast iron surface back to showroom condition with a little help from carbon method first some wd-40 and a maroon scotch brite pad on my random orbital sander loosens all that grime a quick wipe with a shop towel reveals oh my goodness a wipe down with mineral spirits gets rid of most of what's left behind but then I can grab the carbon cleanse by carbon method to make sure that that surface is perfectly clean and ready for the next step which is carbon coat this is a graphene enhanced protector for metal that stops rust and corrosion it repels moisture and it resists scratches and reduces friction that's a lot of stuff in a little bottle and because I like to go overboard I applied four coats of this before moving on to the last step of carbon glide this is the friction reducer it completely replaces having to wax all of your tools I love the results so much I did the same thing on my jointer and my table saw now here's a before of the bandsaw and here's the after pretty crazy jointer before jointer after table saw before and the table saw after and as you can see my tools are like an air hockey table cheer up Lola everything is better now and now a little tongue and groove joinery for the door now when running through the groove you try to get that blade as centered as possible but it doesn't always work so if you run it through on one face flip it around and run it through again you will have a perfectly centered groove also you really want to have test pieces that are the same thickness as your final pieces so that you can test the joinery for all of these the groove is the groove but the real test piece will be on your rails so that you can fine tune the tongue into the groove I took a big gamble here and didn't run any test pieces but fortunately it worked out I forgot to film this but I also needed to perform plunge cuts to remove the shoulder on the back of the door pieces to accept the glass the rails were just ripped off completely but the styles needed to now be finished up with the handsaw and then we'll fine tune those later I'm just dry fitting this now to take a measurement for the glass so I can get that ordered so I did decide to do dowel joinery on the rails and styles of the door those little stub tenons just weren't sitting well with me and I know this will create a much stronger longer lasting door I did have to make my own three-eighths inch dowels though and it's purely coincidental that I'm wearing that shirt during this glue-up but I am using TotalBoat Thixo which is thickened epoxy for this glue-up even though it's not that difficult there are a lot of little pieces and parts and I can tell you looking back through the footage this was a 17 minute glue-up so if I had used regular PVA glue it would have started setting up long before then and I would have got into trouble so epoxy for the win and the extended open time and once everything was all dry I could clean out those little corners from our plunge cuts to make way for the glass all right now we can size the door now I already trimmed the top to get everything nice and flush so I'm going to butt it up to this side if you remember we had put these 1 16th inch spacers and since I had already trimmed a little bit off the top here I want to make sure I take the same amount off the bottom so I'm going to take my 3 30 seconds spacer draw a line there and draw a line there 3 30 seconds now when I make this cut I'm going to take that pencil line and that will account for the little bit I trimmed off the top and should give me exactly 3 30 seconds top and bottom now left to right I had sized this a little bit smaller this way to get the maximum amount of tenon on my rails so this is already 5 30 seconds of an inch gap so I only need to take one 30 second off this edge and since I'm only taking a 30 second off I could give it a quick haircut over at the joiner in a couple of passes all right so I'm going to take my starrett straight edge just using a little CA glue some painter's tape I'm going to stick this in place on my cut lines and flush trim it now I could use my track saw for this but I thought I'd show you a different way all right Jerry you're gonna have to move big guy come back over here all right you can sit there if you want now you will get tear out at the end of this cut if you don't clamp on a sacrificial piece or you can do what I did and just do a little climb cut for that last eighth of an inch it's my 3 30 second little spacer blocks fit looks good let's drill the holes for the hinges I showed this little hinge drilling jig in one of my videos before but I'll put a link in the description it's not bad for 50 bucks there's a lot of ways to hold in the glass on a door like this I'm going to be making some custom stops that get secured with 23 gauge pin nails quick dry fit to confirm all pieces are fitting nice and snugly I'm adding a little chamfer around the inside edge as a detail and I'm also going to put one where the stop meets the door frame so where those two pieces butt together it looks intentional and not just a butt joint now we have to wait for the glass to come in these cob leds are going to be run around in one continuous loop first thing I'm going to do is cut this off because it's going to be hardwired giving myself a little extra just in case now I've never used these particular leds before but I can say for the price it is a really good value the adhesive backing is really strong it was flexible enough to round the corner when I went under the bottom and up the side and this was a 16 foot length I believe you can get it in 32 foot as well now I did test these with the 24 volt wires the electrician ran in the house first before running them so I advise you do the same if you ever do this this silicone diffuser is great it fits nice and snug in that channel it's flexible you don't need an aluminum channel in there and then a plastic diffuser on top it's also easy to remove this will most likely become my go-to diffuser and now I could play electrician splicing these wires I did a little heat shrink tubing around each wire and then heat shrunk them together I figured that was a little neater than having wire nuts up there whoo dimmer lovely all right let me run you through the electrical work I had to do here previously this was a three gang box there was a switch for the dining room and two switches one for the island one for the kitchen so we took the island in the kitchen and put this on a double switch here then added this switch for the leds which is power and the transformer and a dimmer switch and then added a gfci outlet here so I could power appliances on the counter so this was quite a bit of work as well as running 24 volt wires up the wall and poking about the hole at the top that we just spliced together sometimes there's those little parts of a build that don't necessarily happen sequentially so now is as good a time as any to glue on the hardwood edging on these shelves for the upper cabinet notice the color difference between solid riffs on oak and riffs on plywood pretty dramatic all right let's mount some drawer fronts first I'm drilling an enlarged hole on each side of all drawer fronts these are basically my adjustability holes and now install these large washer head screws and since the diameter of the shaft it's a lot smaller than the hole we pre-drilled there is movement left right up and down to get the drawer front where we want before finally securing it hence my term adjustability screws now we can double check reveals make any adjustments as necessary probably see there this side needs to come up a little bit now the locking devices for the drawer slides do have a ton of adjustability left right up and down but I like to get my drawer front set perfect and use those only as a last resort now with the fine tuning adjustments made my adjustability screws tightened down it's firmly secured with number eight inch and a quarter screws now a little trick I've shown in my previous videos the drawer is in but it's not taking into account any weight on it at all and when I hang this drawer front and screw it in it's not taking into account the weight of this heavy white oak front either so what will happen is if I screw this in remove my spacers the whole drawer will drop a little bit and then you'll have to get under the locking devices make adjustments to bring it up so what I do is take a kettlebell put it inside to simulate weight being in the drawer if not there's still some room for adjustment you see this fit in perfect didn't drop now it's the same process to secure this drawer front as well as the other two and it just so happened while I was getting these drawer fronts installed the drawer poles arrived now the poles I'm going to be using do need to be routed into the top edge of the drawer fronts that way they sit nice and flush and I can't resist a good jig so I made one of those to make sure I get no tear out front or back and to ensure all recesses were the same size and then can screw in the poles now it's back to the upper cabinet okay before we glue on the face frame for the upper I'm going to show you a few specialty clamps we'll be using this is called a style right clamp by fast cap you can see these two five millimeter pins fit into the holes already drilled for your shelves and this clamp can come in and then tighten down the face frame on your cabinet then I have some f-style clamps with this add-on by Bessie that allows me to clamp here and then as I screw this in it will tighten the face frame against the cabinet box I'm using tight bond quick and thick on this because I do not want this glue dripping and running down now because it's quick and thick it is a bit of a race against the clock here to get everything in position and clamps tightened before that glue starts to set and once it was set I could employ another little jig I made here for the hinge plate holes and get those installed and then work on the crown molding now I went about the glue up on this a bit unconventionally I clamped on a little straight edge and then used a hand clamp for a couple minutes until the glue set up and then I let it fully cure and could finally get it up on the cabinet I used some painter's tape and CA glue to adhere some blocks on the front so the crown could sit on that and wouldn't move around on me while I got everything clamped up and secured with screws from the back now I don't recall where I got these shelf pins from because they've been sitting in a drawer for years but they have this little plastic casing around them that gives them a little cushion so they don't get a bad case of bleacher butt the 3 16th inch tempered glass has finally arrived so we can get this installed and this door assembled and hung I put little one millimeter foam padding around to prevent any rattling yeah I broke my left pinky finger it still works though I'm gonna put these hinges in first to lock those in place before I brad nail everything put tape here just to try to alleviate any markings from the pin nailer now that glass adds a significant amount of weight to the door but I think two hinges will still be sufficient if not I can always go back and add one in the middle now if you recall all that jibber-jabber about making sure the shelves were equidistant from each other well that doesn't take into account the thickness of the rails so in the cabinet they are equidistant but when you close the door the gap between the top of the rail and the bottom of the first shelf and up here is less than the middle so visually no one would probably notice but storage wise when you open it they're equal personal preference now I was really torn on what to do with a pole for this door matching the ones we used on the drawers just didn't look right so I opted for this push to open mechanism which leaves no knobs or handles visible at the top a knob or pole could always be added later but if it was put in now and I didn't like it you'd kind of be stuck with the notch that you routed out for the handle now the countertop I found is very close to the existing countertop in the kitchen it's not exact but it's pretty darn close it was a bit pricey but granted it's not cheap yeah that one stung a little bit installed now in case you haven't noticed I am not a professional photog and trying to photograph white oak at different angles and get it to be the same color and tone all the time is extremely difficult hence the color variation that you might see through these photos all right let's review costs my total cost including the electrician was $1,944 which begs the question how can you do it for less I'll go smallest to biggest now you could use non-tempered glass for the door and I'm guessing that's about 50 bucks back in your pocket you could use side mount slides instead of under mounts that's probably $75 saved there and instead of rift sawn white oak you could use flat sawn now some people prefer that look anyway so between the lumber and plywood that could save you a hundred dollars for the drawers you could make your own out of plywood and probably save yourself two hundred dollars and I saved the biggest for last do your own electrical work you may not even need switches and outlets like I did or want to hard wire the leds that's $450 off the ledger so even though these cost cuts would bring these cabinets down a tier it could keep $875 in your bank account let me know if you think of any other cost savings to be had without sacrificing on the look thanks so much for watching we'll see you on the next one