My cabinet making skills are still fairly basic and things such as drawers and doors on cabinets have always frightened me, so I have tended to avoid them. But when a friend commissioned me to complete a couple of projects involving children’s size furniture, I had to bite the bullet and give them a go.
First up was including a drawer in a small (toddler size) study desk. This was always going to be extremely obvious, so I needed to be reasonably precise in my work. I found that relatively cheap drawer runners from Bunnings were actually easy to work with. The drawer mounted part of the runner wrapped from the side onto the base of the drawer, so that was easy to position. The cabinet part of the runner was a little bit more complicated as I had to get the vertical position reasonably precise. I overcame that issue by doing a dry fit of the pieces of the desk and using just the side of the drawer to get my position right.
Then there was the addition of doors to a cabinet. What started out as a small open wardrobe changed to one with doors because the friend was afraid her young daughter would pull things out of it if it was always open. The issue for me was doing double doors meeting in the middle of the cabinet with no central spine in the cabinet and then making the doors able to be locked. Also, there was the desire to be able to remove the doors at some time in the future and use the cabinet without them. There were several design challenges as well as my fear that I would do a poor job of actually hanging the doors.
To cover the ability to lock the doors I designed them with a lap join. The door with the back half of the lap would be held closed by slide bolts top and bottom. The overlapping door would then have a cabinet lock where the tongue lid behind the other door.
The desire to potential remove the doors at a later stage meant that I didn’t want to create rebates for the hinges on the cabinet itself. I bought non-mortise hinges, which allowed me to chisel a recess and mount them in the doors then just screw them straight onto the mounting surface of the cabinet. If the are removed, all that needs to be done is to fill, sand and varnish the screw holes.
I found that fastening the doors to the cabinet was an awkward single person job (in hindsight, I should have got someone to assist in holding the doors). I also discovered that my cabinet had a slight barrel shape which required a little bit of fiddling with the position of the hinges.
Also, I found that my lap joint was fine with my dry fit, but once I fastened the hinges to the doors and cabinet the doors wouldn’t close. I had to sand the laps back several millimetres to get a neat fit that still allowed for the varnish that would be added later.
So, summing it up – my fear of including drawers and doors on my cabinetry was unfounded. With a little bit of thought and planning and a large degree of care in construction – good results were quite achievable.