Kitchen CabinetsMarch 11th. My mate Alf who is a keen follower of progress on the laurence/jones mansion has just given me a tune up for not keeping the website updated. So just for you Alfred, here is the latest report. We have moved into the house so this report is coming to you from the computer in my shiny new office. The final inspection was done at the beginning of February and the occupancy certificate arrived in the post a few days later. We moved the marmalade on the 7th and it now resides in the still unfinished kitchen cabinets. In this report I will focus on how I went about building those cabinets 
I chose to build the cabinets myself because I was not too impressed with the quality of the flat pack units available. Custom built was a problem because our local cabinet-maker didn't seem too interested in giving me a quote and the cost of getting them made and shipped meant they where not an option. So, DIY was the way to go. I settled on euro style cabinets because they are relatively easy to build, basically just a bunch of boxes with doors or drawers. I will give a little detail on my method for site building your own cabinets. It may not be the bee's knees best way of going about it but some may find the information useful. I'm happy with the final product.
The first thing that needs to happen is the saw set up. I use a 6-1/4"circular saw for this job because it's easy to handle and the smaller blade gives a finer cut. To set it up, make a few cuts on some scrap timber, running the saw along a straight edge. Make a cut using both sides of the footplate against the straight edge. This will give you the offset for your cuts. I have them printed on a piece of tape stuck to the saw (no problem with forgetting them). You need the offset for both sides of the blade ie: four measurements. Once you have these measurements it's simply a matter of adding or subtracting them to or from your cutting dimensions. For my cabinets I have chosen to use moisture resistant particleboard. Although not totally water proof, once painted it is at least as good as melamine, in fact I think it's better. Waterproof ply would have been a better choice but the cost was the deciding factor there. Particleboard comes in 2.4 and 2.7meter sheets, it is also sold already veneered if you are looking for the timber look. I chose to use it raw and paint it. 
Particularly important is a well-drawn plan. This will help with the layout and sizing of the individual carcasses. At this stage you need to work out the door sizes as well. The drawers are not such a problem if you are using the steel-sided type, as the bottoms are just cut to suit. I have gone with the Blum drawers but there are other manufacturers of this type of system. Once the individual unit sizes are established I normally draw a rough sketch of each one and work out the cut sizes I need. You can of course work out all the cuts you need for all your units, to get the best use out of your sheets. Although, I have found that it will usually work out if you just work on one unit at a time. The off-cuts can usually be worked in somewhere else. If you own a biscuit jointer it is possible to glue some of these off-cuts together and use them in non-critical areas of the work. 
Before I start on the cutting I mark all the factory edges and corners, These, on good quality products are usually straight and square. I try to take all of my measurements off these edges. To get the cuts straight it's just a matter of measuring from the sheet edge and clamping a straightedge on your cut-line, plus or minus, the saw offset you need. One important thing to remember is to establish which side of the line you need to cut on. Because I have a table saw I will normally cut a few millimetres over-size and trim them to an exact size later. The same thing can be done with a router and trim bit, using the factory edge of another sheet as a guide. If you don't have access to these tools a little extra care will be needed in the initial cutting process to get them straight and true. I have used a pine edge band on all of the exposed edges on my cabinets. For convenience I have ripped and thicknessed them to 18mm square (the same as the thickness of the particle board sheets). It is possible to buy an iron-on edge band but I personally don't trust it as being waterproof (most melamine cabinets are done this way). The edge-banding is glued as are the rest of the cabinet joins using a high strength, polyurethane construction adhesive. This stuff foams up and will provide a good water-proof join. The banding can be applied before the pieces are cut, or after, in which case you need to allow for them in your dimensions. 
It is worth taking a bit of care with the gluing of these edges and making sure that the glue joint is full. This is where particleboard is most prone to moisture damage, especially close to the sink area. Once sanded and painted these edges mostly disappear. And I believe they are a lot more waterproof than the iron on type. New Blog(I have finally got motivated enough to start a new blog so if you like you can pop over there) |
