Brian explains the various design elements of a cabinet door. From panel raise, to edge profile, to framing bead, consider this a cabinet door anatomy lesson. Comment, give us a call, or reach out to your Cabinet Coach with any questions. We hope you enjoy your new cabinets!
Video Transcript
In this video we’re going to talk to you a little bit about Conestoga’s dovetail drawer box options. The first thing I want to comment on is all of Conestoga’s drawer boxes are dovetailed. They don’t do any staple construction. Everything is going to be figure joint dovetail, just the way this drawer box on this example is shown.
What you do have options on is wood construction. Their lowest level is a plywood, a half inch plywood drawer box where it’s … you know, you’ve got a veneer in it, but the front, the inside and the outside, the top edge are all veneered so it looks like solid wood, but it’s not. You will see the open veneer striations on your dovetails, but it’s still a good, strong drawer box at a really nice price point. It probably saves about $10 off of a typical solid wood drawer box.
The next step up is 5/8 solid wood birch. It’s a real solid wood. Birch is considered a hardwood. It’s going to have a little bit of color in it, and also knots and open … not open, but some browner material, that kind of thing. It is not going to have any knots that are going to fall out or that kind of thing. It’s very, very solid. It does have a little more color in it. That’s all. For about $10 a drawer box more you can jump up to soft maple and then to hard maple. Those just give you a little more of a clean look. It doesn’t have quite as much character to it as the natural birch does.
In our estimation, it’s not a very good use of your money, though, because you can save an awful lot of money with that natural birch box, and most people can’t tell the difference between it and the maple. We infrequently sell the upgrades to the soft and hard maple, but it is there if you’d like it.
Now, some of the options we can do in drawer boxes include cutlery dividers. They’re solid wood. They nest in exactly fitting the drawer box they’re going in. We have different configurations so you can divide up the compartments of those cutlery dividers any way you like. We have set in place space tray inserts so your spice bottles will sit at an angle on those tray inserts. We can do breadbox lids with a deeper drawer box than your lower drawers in your kitchen. You can have a retractable lid for your bread. We also do scoop fronts, like a hand pull option, so if you’re using dovetail drawer boxes for your rollout trays and you open your cabinet doors, you’ve got a nice hand pull option on the front of those drawers.
All sorts of options, all shown on the website, which you can go take a look at. It will help you through any questions you might have, but there’s so many accessories to make the inside of your drawer boxes more storage friendly.
One unlisted option most folks don’t even know is available is custom specie drawer boxes. We want to drawer your attention to that over here. This customer has decided to use a contrast. You can see that the rest of the kitchen is crystal white with a coffee glaze. He has decided to use a cherry drawer box which is a little bit different color, at a contrast with that finish, and he chose to orient them so that the dovetails are facing outward instead of to the side. Normally your dovetails would be here. This customer chose to order these custom so that you can see the dovetails, which is a really neat, kind of, traditional Shaker idea.
There’s so much creativity you can use to try to dress your kitchen up and make it look different than you’d get at Home Depot or Lowes, and all it takes is a question. Just ask us and we’ll help you through it. Drawer boxes are available in custom sizes and 16th inch increments. There is a limitation in height where the height has to be at 1/2 inch increments, but the width and depth can be any increment you want or any size you want in 16th inch increments.
As far as making your drawer boxes more sturdy, we get a lot of folks asking, “Well, I’ve got a 36 inch cooktop cabinet with this big wide drawer box that’s holding really heavy copper pots, that kind of thing. How do I make the bottom more stable or secure?” It’s worth noting the standard bottom is 1/4 inch plywood. That 1/4 inch plywood is dadoed into the cabinet’s side. It’s not going to fall off. It’s not like it’s stapled to the bottom. It’s a good, solid bottom. We do offer a 3/8 thick bottom for your drawer boxes, as an option, and that on your wider drawer boxes, this can give you a little more security that the bottom is going to be stable and not buckle or bow. There is an upcharge for that option, but it is available if you need it.
All the information you need on drawer boxes is on the website, and the attachments therein, but you can always give us a call at our toll free, 888-211-6482, and we can talk you through some of those options.
