Kitchen Cabinets part 7- Drawer Fronts

This week we tried to zero in our focus on finishing the cabinets. I am easily distracted by the next "shiny" project and attempted to derail us with a little backsplash work (it's going to be so pretty!), but Scott brought me back to my senses and we worked on the drawer faces.

We started with the drawer fronts which are made of 5 pieces: two rails, two styles, and the actual face.

The rails and styles are the pieces of Poplar that give our cabinets the "shaker" look we were going for. Like this:

Each piece had to be cut to size and sanded, then we cut the mortices and tenons (the grooves and tabs that hold it all together), the rabbet joints on the faces, and assembled:

The drawer faces had to be glued and clamped and left overnight to dry.

The next morning was all about filling and sanding. You can tell in the video, we don't have *quite* the right saw for cutting the mortices and tenons, so some were a little tight, some a little loose, so filling all the gaps makes them look nice and flush.

In between the filling/drying/sanding we worked on the drawer boxes for the sink.

If you remember from any of our other cabinet posts we use Blum slides that have a bracket in the back that they clip into. Like this:

First, we attach the bracket to a 2x4 then we secure the 2x4 to the back of the cabinet before snapping the slide into place.

The slides we got this time (more on that in a minute) work the same way so we cut some 2x4s to size and put them through the jointer to get a nice square edge.

Check out the difference in the rounded edge on the piece we didn't out through the jointer:

By putting the 2x4 through the jointer we removed the rounded edge, allowing it to butt up against the side of the cabinet fully.

We still had one more thing standing in our way: the hoses/pipes under the sink. There's a hole in the side of the sink cabinet for the water pipes, dishwasher hose, and hose for the fridge water line. So the 2x4 in the back corner needed a notch cut out of it to allow these to pass through.

Here's what we did:

Once we had the 2x4s in place we could cut and assemble the drawer boxes:

The drawer box cutting/assembly goes really fast now that we know what we are doing!

The slides we ordered for the sink cabinet came in from Home Depot but one of the four came broken, so we could only do three drawers. These were "off-brand" drawer slides as the Blum ones we prefer have skyrocketed in price and declined significantly in availability, so these were what we had to work with. They were only slightly cheaper than the normal price we pay for Blum slides (typically $35/slide, we paid $27/slide for these, but Blums are currently over $70/slide!) but the quality was lacking. Learn from our error, spend the extra few dollars for Blum! These are still soft-close as you'll see in a minute, but they are harder to open, requiring a decent tug to get them open. Because these are at the sink, I'm not too worried about them, but I wouldn't want these everywhere.

Once the drawers were in we turned our attention back to the drawer faces for painting. We are running low on paint (still on the first gallon though!), so we did a quick stop to Sherwin Williams only to find that they are completely out of semi-gloss paint. Their shelves were bare! So we had to roll/brush instead of using the paint sprayer.

We set up our workstation:

They're so pretty! 😍

We got two coats of paint on, sanding in between coats. We'll do one more on the front and at least two on the back around the edges before they're installed.