How to Make a Cabinet Using Plywood Step by Step
Hi there, miss me? Today I'm going to teach you how to build cabinets out plywood for the slide drawers we made before. This is a guide for beginners and it's very simple, so don’t be afraid you can do this!
Step by step I’ll show you in detail how to make this DIY cabinet so we can save some money, get as many plywood kitchen cabinets as we want and keep getting better in this art of woodworking
How to make DIY cabinet out of plywood
1/2 Days
Moderate
May vary
Lily Martin
Materials
Wood glue or melamine glue
¾ Prefinished Plywood
Pocket hole jig
L supports
2 Hinghes
Some screws
Paint
Tools
Steps for Making a Base Cabinet
Measures and Structure
The parts you will use may vary by where you are going to place the cabinet. The steps are pretty much the same taking out the parts you aren’t going to use
The cabinet carcass will have two sides made from ¾” plywood. All the sides will have the same sizes. This is not a rule you always can choose and modify the measures and the steps, if you like you can make deeper cabinets.
In the back of the cabinet, we’ll be useing a ¼” plywood or leave it without wood if it’s going to be stuck to the wall or inside it.
The bottom of the cupboard sits in the toe kick
Toe Kick, it’s the base in charge of keeping the cabinets up off the floor
All cabinets will have a top piece the type to be used may vary
Supports are small pieces of plywood that are used to keep the cabinet box square. You will use 1 or 2 on the top piece on cabinets
In the face frame, we can build a door or use the drawers we built in the previous post where I taught you how to build a cabinet drawer
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How to Build Cabinet Drawers Step by Step
1- Measure and Cut the plywood
Making the walls, top, and base of the cabinets it's a subjective part. You can use the measures you want, normally the height of the cabinets is 36” with 24” deep. At the time to choose sizes have into consideration the space you have and that the wider the doors, the greater the tendency to crack and warp.
Start by cutting the short side to square with the long side. Label them on the fly for easier assembly later. For a precise cut you can use this table saw.
If you don't know how to build the toe kicks they are around 4″ tall and 2-3″ deep.
2- Drill Pocket Holes
Set your pocket hole jig up to drill holes. I recommend punch drill locator guide for perfect precision. Drill pocket holes in both sides of the bottom piece, top piece, and support pieces. Drill them every 4-5 inches, for the support pieces, make sure you have 2 at each end.
3- Assemble the box and Paint it
Give it a hand of paint before assemble and one after so there will be no imperfections.
Now it’s time to join the pieces together and glue the box to make it last. Use a square to ensure it is square and immobile, in my personal opinion corner clamps like Procorner worked very well for this kind of things. After putting the pieces together, hold them securely with 1 1/4″ pocket hole screws. Do this with the side, the bottom, and the top. Remember that the bottom of the box has to be room for the toe kicks like it’s in the image. Finish off the toe-kick with a piece of 1/4″ plywood.
4- Finishing It
At this point, if you made our drawers guide that we named above where we tell you how to put the sliders and everything, your cabinets with drawers will be finished. In case that you don’t want drawer sliders you can build some shelves for the cupboard.
First measure the opening of your cabinet; cut the wood(leaving a little space for the thickness of the L supports);
Place the cutted wood where you want it and make a mark;
Make peg holes for the L support (one on each corner ¾ from the edge) in the sides for your adjustable shelves.
Place the support and now place the shelf above
5- How to build cabinet doors out of plywood
Measure the width and length of the box, cut the wood in those sizes and place the hinges on one side at 4" from the edges with screws on the box and the door.
And with that we will be done the cabinet is ready to be used as storage, be under de sink or in your kitchen. If you change some steps you can make it hang off the wall I leave you some very important tips, I hope you read them. Now tell me is there better satisfaction than wearing something you built yourself? Leave it in the comments I’m reading you.
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Tips for a happy building
- Measure is the key of success, don't be afraid to do this multiple times. We all forget the sizes if we don't write them down.
- Use prefinished plywood so you don’t have to seal it. Or you can just add 2-3 coats of a polyurethane finish to them
- You can use Sketch Up to model 3D your furniture before start doing it
- Before you start cutting, take notice that the angle is correctly fixed at 90 degrees. 1º can ruin your perfect square
- Measure, place the blade in the correct position and cut. Never Measure all and start cutting because the blade will remove a part of the plywood known as kerf
- Check all the pieces are squares or correctly measured out. Measure from the top right corner across the piece to the lower left corner and then the same with the two other corners, and compare
If you liked this post you can leave us a comment and your email so we can send you new beautiful and easy projects for you to do, and get some discounts if you are interested.
