Video Transcript
Hello, everybody! Brian from the Cabinet Joint here. Today, we're going to be building a wall one-drawer cabinet. The assembly of this is very similar to a wall two-drawer cabinet, except there's one drawer at the bottom instead of two. Follow the same principles here, just an extra partition panel.
This is a really big cabinet, available in a range of sizes from 12 inches wide with a single door, all the way up to 36 inches wide, which I think this one is, where you get double doors. From 24 to 36 inches, you can actually get this as one big opening with no upright divider; that's an option. So, you have a big range of sizes from 12 to 36 inches wide and from 30 inches high all the way to 72 inches high. These become really large, like this one here. Depths range from 12 inches deep up to 24 inches deep in 3-inch increments. The reason for the 3-inch increments is the drawer glides and drawer boxes come in 3-inch increments only, due to the Blum drawer depth limitations.
Keep in mind you are limited as opposed to a normal wall cabinet, where you can go in 1/16-inch increments. This has a drawer, so it's 3-inch increments, 12 to 24 inches.
Now, you might be asking where you might use this cabinet. They make great anchor cabinets. We've seen these used a lot in double vanity applications. If you can picture an 84 or 90-inch wide double bowl vanity with his and her sinks, sometimes you'll see people center one of these between them, so they kind of have a divider there with some valances above. You'll see these in kitchens, anchoring the end of a run, making a great little drawer to put keys or whatever, like a little junk drawer. Lots of uses for this cabinet.
Bear in mind, when you go to install this, this cabinet cannot go onto the countertop until the countertop is there. When you get to the point of running your wall cabinets across, they're going to be determined by where the top of that cabinet is. What we often find we have to do in the install is we have our refrigerator cabinet, a series of wall cabinets going over your sink or whatever, and if this was sitting on the far right, we'd leave that off. The countertop would go down, then we set this in, and if we have to jack it up a little bit, you can always elevate it on shims, then wrap the bottom in a quarter round. What you don't want to have is that series of wall cabinets and tall cabinets so low that you have to end up trimming the bottom of this cabinet off.
Be mindful that the countertop, usually an inch and a quarter for granite, is going to sit on top of that, and you really have to be mindful of making sure the top of that lines up as closely as possible with your walls and talls throughout the room. As long as you factor that stuff in, it's a great cabinet to give you a real anchored look on the left, right, or maybe both sides. Just a really beautiful cabinet.
This one, the customer is not putting doors on it. They have a matching interior and they're going to paint the whole thing themselves, so it's all just raw wood. That's why you've got this banding through here, but it's a beautiful cabinet. When you put doors on it or glass doors, it's just a really, really pretty cabinet. So, let's show you how this thing goes together.
Okay, before we get started on the assembly of this wall one-drawer, let's do a little housekeeping, as we always do. We're going to walk through some quick tools. This doesn't require anything that most of our cabinets don't: a bottle of white glue. We like the Titebond II; you can use Titebond III, whatever you like. The Titebond III is just a little shorter set time and it's waterproof.
I've got my stapler; we use a Bostitch, but you can use any with 1-inch staples. You'll go through a lot of those in a job, so make sure you get a box of those. I've got a wet rag to wipe out any excess glue that might squeeze to the inside of the cabinet. I've got a pencil for marking lines; you'll see that in the video. For this particular cabinet, I have a flush end on one side of the cabinet, and we have a different method of fastening the back when it's a flush end. We're going to use a couple of clamps for that. Aside from that, you might need a tape measure and some other basic tools, but it's nothing you haven't seen in the other videos.
The other thing I want to comment on is if you're doing inset, you'll notice that I have brackets over here for the inset drawer glides. Those are called TANDOCK brackets; they carry the drawer glide inside the cabinet because as an inset, it can't sit on the front frame. If I had doors on this cabinet, which I don't because it's a matching interior open cabinet with no doors, but if I had doors, I would want to make sure my hinge brackets are on. In this case, there'd be three because it's a tall door.
I'd want all my hinge brackets on. There's a video reference below; you want to go watch that if you're doing inset and see how to put all that hardware on and do that before you assemble. If you assemble the box before you put that hardware on, you're forced to kind of work inside the cabinet. CU all these parts fastened to the back of the front frame makes it really difficult to put them on, not really difficult, but much more difficult to put them on a finished box or an assembled box versus doing it before you assemble like we've done here. So, I've got my 10ax brackets on, don't have hinges now. I'm going to get started on the assembly. And if you're inset, you're back with us now, and we all kind of proceed the same way with gluing and pinning. Let's get started. Okay, as always, our first operation is gluing up. So what I'm going to be doing is gluing both shoulders of this groove on both sides of the cabinet. We've got a shoulder here and a shoulder here with a deeper groove that receives our 3-in black spline that's part of the cabinet sides. Um, so I'm going to go ahead and glue both those shoulders all the way down on both sides, and then I'm going to run a bead of glue right across here above this spline groove. I don't want to run it to the inside shoulder or that will squeeze out to the inside of the cabinet. So I'm going to run my bead glue across the top there, then across the bottom here. And because I have a mid partition to separate my wall section from my drawer section, there's a cabinet floor in here. So I do have a panel contacting, so I'm going to run a bead of glue there as well. So you're going to watch me get started with that, follow along. And we don't want to put too much glue in there. Make sure your glue bottle tip is nice and clean. If you put too much glue on these grooves, it ends up just running out the bottom of the cabinet or squeezing out to the inside of the cabinet or even worse, uh, a flush end. If you have a flush end on the cabinet, it'll get on that, and then you have to wipe it back off. And in a case like this with an unfinished flush end, the wood glue will actually get into the veneer, and we don't want that. So be very careful with your glue to make a nice, oops, a nice bead. And as I say that, my glue bottle bumped the frame style, so I'll have to clean that real quick. Okay, summarize. I got my glue on both shoulders, both sides, and then bottom, middle, and top. Cleaned up my little glue goober over here with the bottle bumped into that, uh, jog and the style. So I'm going to go ahead and take my unfinished side. That's the one that I can get on without you being blocked. And what we're going to do is line the top of the cabinet frame up with the top of the panel, and we're going to just push that down on, and it'll kind of stay there for us. Going to do the exact same thing with this flush side. Going to line it up, set it down, tap it into place. Okay, we're going to go ahead with our glue bottle now, and we're going to start halfway down the dovetail, and we're going to squeeze a bead of glue into all three of these dovetails on both sides. So six spots here, and again, we start halfway because as we push that panel down into the cabinet for the final assembly, it will spread that glue out for us. If you fill the whole dovetail with glue, you'll end up pushing all the glue down; it just puddles in the bottom of the front frame and makes a pretty bad mess. Okay, now that you got your dovetails glued up on all four on both sides, I had six of them. Want to talk real quick about the tops and bottoms? If you were to do a normal cabinet that had doors on it, you're going to have a pre-finished veneer. So obviously got a shiny, slick surface on it that's going to face the inside of the cabinet. In my case, I'm building a cabinet with an unfinished interior. The customer wants to paint these themselves, so both sides of my panel look the same. You just want to make sure you're putting the finish side in, and these splines go down.
Um, the other thing I want to make note of is this particular cabinet has an upright center style, and it's beaded inset. You may run into this if you've got a beaded inset and an upright center style. The way they hunch that frame in, it kind of covers up the spline groove for these splines, and this middle one might hit that hunch. Uh, we'll show you a picture on the screen so you can see what's going on here. What you may have to do before you assemble is just tap that spline left or right to get it off of center so when you shove this panel down in, it can fully make contact where it's supposed to. So I'm going to go ahead, line this up. Oops, got my wrong to get my nice side in, and we're going to line our dovetails up and push down. I already made sure my spline groove was off to the side. It needs to go a little more, so I'm going to go ahead and knock that just a little bit. Okay, okay, and now we can push that down and get it fully seated. If you need to, you can use a rubber mallet. I did not comment on a rubber mallet in our intro on the tools. We do have a tools video reference below; you can go check that out, and you can see all the tools you'll need to build a cabinet. I like to keep the dead blow mallet or a rubber mallet around, uh, just for these kinds of things when I don't want to use the palm of my hand. So now the rest of this goes the same way, so I've got all three in; they're all seated. You want to make sure you have good contact between the front of the panel and the back of the front frame. If you don't, you're going to need to use a rubber mallet or some um, body weight leverage to push that in until you do have contact. Okay, our next operation is to glue the contact points for the cabinet back and then pin it in place. So let me describe where the glue is going, and I'll show you how to do it. We're going to put glue on the vertical surface all along here. Don't put it on the horizontal surface on a typical cabinet because that back is going to be finished, and so you won't get any glue bond. In the case of this cabinet, the inside is an unfinished back. I really don't want glue to squeeze out there, so you want to glue this vertical so there's very little chance of glue getting around that corner and smearing out to the inside of the cabinet. We're also going to glue top, middle, and bottom panels all the way across. So to do these side ones, instead of orienting the glue with the slot and the glue bottle going this way, I'm going to tip it up so the slots are going this way and I can get a nice bead of glue across that vertical area. Now using my finger as a guide, I can just run the glue bottle down each of these legs. Okay, now my good friend Jeffrey, to come on screen. This is a bigger than normal cabinet back. It's just one we had going through our shop here in Gettysburg, so I didn't get a chance to choose the size, but it's a big one. And I'm going to want Jeffrey to help me with laying this panel on and then showing you how to staple down a flush end. So you just line up the top and bottom. You will see on your cabinet back, there's a series of holes, pre-drilled holes. Wherever those contact panels are, those are your marking holes, your marking locators. When we actually go to pin that on, that marks where your panels are. I'm going to use my dead blow and make sure my panel back panel is fully seated so that the cabinet uprights, the middle bottom and top um, partitions are into those doos, so you'll, you'll know it'll make a nice firm thud, and you'll have about a quarter of an inch all the way along here on both sides. So now this is where I want to grab a couple of clamps. First thing I'm going to do is try to get these side SOS together, so we're going to run a clamp left and right here, make sure that's down real good, and we're going to put another one in here. And you'll see these come into play right now because when you pin the unexposed side, I'll show you in a minute, we're just going to strike a line and run the nailer down the side. I cannot nail into the side of a finished cabinet; you're going to see those nail holes, so I want to come through the back, and we have to actually toenail the staple at an angle so it doesn't protrude and blow out to the inside of the cabinet. So to do that, I'm going to unhook my air. Most finished nailers or finished staplers have a little protective tip that's really to it's like a non-marring tip to keep the metal barb on the front of this from digging into your wood. This is a cabinet back; I don't care. I'm going to remove that. And the reason I do that is so that I can get nice and tight up into the corner here. So I'm going to reconnect my air, and now what I do is I put the heel of the gun on the cabinet back and run the tip of the nail gun right up into the corner, and now I can go all along here about every 3 or 4 inches. Now, I'm going to swap my clamp down, make sure I'm nice and set, keep working, swap my clamp down again. Okay, that takes care of my finish side, so now I can put my tip back on. So I'm going to disconnect my air; we don't want to run a nail through our finger. Disconnect my air and put that protective tip back on. Now, I'm going to go off camera here and spin the cabinet around so you can see what I'm doing on this side. We'll be right back. Okay, now I just want to make a quick scribe line along this side so I know when I'm pinning into my unfinished side, I'm actually into the center of this panel. So you can use either a speed square, mini speed square, full-size speed square, or just your finger. What we're trying to do is find the center of the thickness of this panel, find the center of it, and I can do it with my eye and look, and I'm going to use my finger as a guide. If you want to use a speed square, you can do that. Find the center; there's usually notches in them, and then use this as your guide. I just use my finger, so we're just going to do this all the way down, and now I know that's the dead center of this panel. So now I can very easily work across. Probably have to keep the gun upside down because it's a very short cabinet; I can't get it upright this way without the hose running in. I want to keep constant pressure as I push down on this top; I don't want the top to poke up inside. About every 3 or 4 inches, I am airing up on the center of this panel because this is a matching interior cabinet. I really don't want to blow a staple through, so you might see some little indents as the staples are towards the top of this veneer. I really don't want it in the bottom of the veneer, so that's why I'm purposefully airing towards the top. Now, all I do is work across these three sections here where my pre-marked holes are and actually fasten the back to those uprights with those partitions. So I'm going to go on either side of all these holes; in this case, I can use my finger as a guide. Okay, I've got my back fastened on. I'm going to go through and just kind of make sure my sides are all seated, especially on that flush end. I'm going to be looking to make sure at the ends my cabinet sides are dead flush with the ends of the front frame. If you have the cabinet sides this way and your front frame is being pulled out of square, not a good thing, so we want the tops and bottoms of the cabinet sides to be level with the top and bottom of the front frame. Now, my last operation on this cabinet or really any cabinet is to stand it up and inspect the interior, so I'm going to come back on screen in a minute once I've stood it up. I'm going to inspect the interior for glue squeeze out so I can wipe that out, and in this particular case, whenever I have a finished flush end like this, I want that bond between the front frame and the front edge of this cabinet side to be as tight as possible.
So, I'm going to grab some clamps and maybe some blocks of wood and put three or four clamps across the front to make sure I've got a nice tight seam, and I'll show you that as well. Okay, so let's, um, kind of backtrack in terms of what we've done so far and where we have to go now. The cabinet’s built. I did put a block of wood here, a long brace, then you two clamps. What I'm visually checking is to make sure all along the side my cabinet side is tight up against the back of my frame. That's a visible end, so we want to make sure we keep that as tight as possible. If you're limited on clamps, you can use blocks of wood to kind of stretch that press force across more of the frame. We have tons of clamps, so in our shop, we typically fill that with four or five clamps. If you have them, use them. If you've only got a couple of clamps, this is a trick you can use to try to spread that pressure along that long style like that. Um, I checked the inside to make sure I had no glue, and because I was careful with my glue application, I actually had no squeeze out, which is what I wanted on a matching interior cabinet that has yet to be finished by the customer. I don't want that white glue, that wood glue soaking into the wood and creating a place where the finish wouldn't take. So, my interior is all wiped out. Now, here's a tidbit I want to instruct you on with these wall cabinets because this is a wall cabinet, it uses a very shallow 9-in door glide. Twelve and 1/2-in deep cabinet uses a 9-in door glide. These do not have the little notch to slide onto the metal angle brackets, and if you were watching during the fit-up or the putting of the back on, you'll notice I didn't have the metal angle brackets on the cabinet back; they're not even pre-marked the way most B base cabinets with drawer boxes would come. That's because on these 12-in deep cabinets or 12 and 1/2-inch deep cabinets with a 9-in deep drawer box, they have to be mounted to the cabinet wall. So here's what I want to show you. First of all, this one's an inset job, so I do want to use my mounting brackets because I want the adjustability of being able to slide that glide for until I get it dialed into where I want. Um, if you're doing overlay, in either case, Conestoga is going to send you these blocks of wood, and what these do is they go inside the cabinet and they mount up behind the front frame. Um, I'm going to go ahead and put those on, but because I want to keep that bracket, I'm going to go to my chop saw and cut a couple of inches off of these. If you were doing full overlay, you wouldn't even have these brackets in here, and you can just push these in, put them right up to the side, and what we're trying to do is flush this panel out with the edge of that front frame because this block side is going to screw in the back. It's going to screw to this block of wood; it's not going to screw to or not melt to those angle brackets. So, I'm going to go to my chop saw, cut these down. This will make more sense when I bring it back over and show you. Okay, so I went to my chop saw and cut this down to miss this bracket. You can look in here and see the 3/4-in block is up against the side of the cabinet. We went ahead and fastened it with this U stapler with 1-in staples. What we don't want to do is come blowing through the side of our finished cabinet, so I've got a 3/4-inch thick block with an 11/16-inch thick cabinet side. So I don't want to use a staple longer than about an inch and a quarter, and we just tack that in there a couple of places. And now what's going to happen is when I put this glide in and I used the machine screw that came with the tandem glides, we're going to screw that to the bracket. This is all covered in our hard-wearing video and how to put the tandems in, and then I'm going to use one of the large wood screws with a flat head that came with your Bloom tandem glides, and I'm just going to pick one of these many holes there to hold it to that block of wood. And now I can go ahead and then put the drawer box in. So I'm going to go off-screen and do that again. I don't want to get into this is not really part of assembly; it's more fit-up, and we have separate videos for that. My main point in showing this was these shallow wall drawer cabinets. If you got up to 18 deep CU, you can do that with these; it would come with the rear brackets. But this one's 12 and these short ones always use that block of wood. And I want to reiterate if you're not doing inset, you can just mount this block of wood straight in there without having to cut it. I had to cut it to miss that bracket. All right, I'm going to put these glides in and come back on screen and walk you through what we're doing. Okay, to wrap this video up and summarize, um, I used a little machine screw that came in the bag with the tentex bracket, I mounted my glide there, I put my one large screw there. I want to make sure it's a large screw CU if you use some of the smaller screws that come with your glides, they're going to pull through thatUm, machine hole there, so you want to use the largest, usually two per pack of drawer glides, you want to use one of the two large screws on either side, so I put those way in the back. My glides are in there rock solid. I fitted up my drawer front separate video for that, but I fitted up my drawer front onto my drawer box, put my gloom clips on, and now my drawer pops in, so that cabinet is ready to ship. I gotta wait till she glues up, but the customer doesn't want doors, and that's the way she's going to ship. I want to stress, um, you're seeing a lot of, like, browns and things in here in this, in this cabinet and some maybe staining on the side here. This is what we call paint-grade maple, so for people who have careful eyes might be like, "Wow, their wood grade isn't very good." This is all paint grade. It's meant to be stained or painted, painted rather, by the customer, so that's all going to get covered. If this was stain grade, you wouldn't see any of this, uh, heartwood; it would be all the nice white sap maple that we're looking for. So, we hope this helps you out. Kind of a long video, but these are kind of kooky cabinets to work with. Um, if you have any questions, contact your cabinet coach as always. They'll walk you through whatever. Um, the designers can help you design with this very, uh, interesting and cool cabinet, as we talked about in the intro. And again, give us a shout if you have any questions. Thanks for watching, everyone. [Music]
