drawer Hardware is expensive I'm going to show you how I saved $1,300 by making super simple cabinets without any hardware and they look good too I'll also reveal the secret to hunting down the best plywood without getting ripped off this episode of wit works is sponsored by Simply Safe the game plan wait wrong Channel this is the design my friend Steve and I came up with now the requirements for this build were simple one I needed at least 10 ft of storage B I want the storage to look good Roman numeral 3 I want the drawers to be standardized so they can move around as my needs change they also need to be easy to build and lastly here's the big one they need to be affordable now I priced out several drawer slide options and the most expensive was $1,300 for 36 sets and the least expensive was $900 so here's the challenge for this build I'm going to try to build this 10ft wall of cabinets for less than the price of drawer Hardware alone now it will be tight but I think I might be able to pull it off since my big table saw is still on the injured reserve list after taking an unplanned bath I'm going to be making these cabinets using a track saw 95% of the time now this is good for you because it gives me the chance to share with you three brilliant tips and tricks that I've come across that will help improve any project that you do with plywood this first one is from Jason Ben so go unsubscribe from his channel if you haven't already before you make any Cuts you want to deal with the factory Edge which is most likely damaged it's really easy you just line up your track about 3 mm off the factory Edge and you make your first cut after that all of your Cuts will be referencing this clean Edge and I admit this is the first time that I've actually done this in a project before because I'm usually in a rush to just get going and I'm embarrassed that I haven't adopted this sooner doing this ensured that all of my cuts were perfect you using this high quality plywood second tip is this use parallel guides they make things faster and easier I would see people using these and for the longest time I didn't understand what the advantage was and so if that's you let me explain it's like having a table saw fence in your hand for your track saw with these flip stops you can set your desired width reference one edge of the piece and without marking or measuring you can make repeated Cuts just like you would at the table saw I was able to cut down a sheet plywood in a matter of minutes accurately because of a well planned cut list and these parallel guides the third tip is closely related and that's if you have parallel guides you don't have to have a really long track that is the length of your material you can get by with just a standard 55 in track you can shimmy your track down the other half of the length after your first cut and since you're referencing the same Edge you get a perfect cut every time now I've never seen anyone do this or talk about it so this is me attempting to take credit credit for the idea but we all know that someone else thought of it first now while I was working my wife came out and told me that it might rain and that it would probably be a good idea to bring the wood in my table saw inside when I looked at the forecast it said no rain and so we got in a slight argument about who was right and I won and left the plywood outside 20 minutes later just as I finished celebrating my victory I noticed this garbage 60% of the time she's right every time speaking of losing battles before I show you how to assemble the cabinet and drawers we need to go back in time to when I tried to buy good plywood for this project the price oh my word the best sheet of plywood I could find was $79 and it still had its voids and issues all right that's not ideal the problem is I need plywood today tomorrow at the latest I don't want to pay $80 for Junk I just want good quality plywood so I'm going to try that other store maybe we'll get lucky so I drove across a street to the Blue Store turns out the price of garbage is also $79 there so that was a waste of time in my last City I found a small company that deals directly to professional cabin makers plywood I got there was usually half the price of what I could find at a big box store and two or three times s the quality I'm in the DFW area now I'm going to try to find one of those places don't think I'm going to be able to find one right off the bat so I'm just going to Google plywood company in Fort Worth and maybe that'll be a good start I literally Googled plywood company in Fort Worth and found this company called not kidding plywood company of Fort Worth I kind of thought it could be an internet scam until I showed up and sure enough that's the name of the company all right I just peaked inside and it looks like a professional showroom I'm a little nervous that they only sell to professionals and they wouldn't sell to a regular guy like me just in case that happens I brought along a secret weapon that is foolproof that when they see it they will welcome me in and sell to anybody at both pricing let's try it out now I was kind of scared but with this solid strategy I walked into the showroom met this guy standing guard and after an awkward steering contest I said the secret password and this happened come on in now this place has it all they even have plywood made from mappa Burl I thought about making my cabinets from it until I saw that it was $1,500 a sheet now since I don't have jackary battery sponsor money I decided to move on and when I got past the showroom I found a helicopter posing as a fan the biggest and cleanest aisles I've ever seen in a lumber yard Walnut at every turn here here and here and I finally found some solid plywood options to test out now the first sheet that I bought to test out was $40 I wanted to see if it would work and I bought another higher grade for 80 just to see if there's a difference I bought some of each to compare to see if I can get away with using a $40 option in the future don't you hate it when YouTubers are lazy and default to that tired and worn SpongeBob transition yeah that's the worst the next day now the coolest part of all this is since I bought more than $450 worth of plywood MDF and black laminate they delivered my order to me the next day for free even though I live 40 minutes away and here's all the the parts that you need to make one cabinet you don't need to waste plywood building a top or a bottom you just need 3in stretchers and one of the stretchers on the bottom will be slightly bigger because of the toe kick we'll talk more about the toe kick in a little bit but right here you can see this is really what makes up each cabinet now on the bottom I'm gluing on a spacer just so that the bottom drawer doesn't ride on the very very bottom and sometimes that plywood wants to bend when you cut it free so this is how you fix that now a lot of people building this cabinet would probably cut Doos in the sides of these cabinets using either a data blade on the table saw or some type of router bit I've done that before and I don't like doing it for a couple of reasons first it makes a lot of sawdust it's loud it makes a mess inevitably I mess it up but most importantly it weakens the sides of the cabinet and that's what happened at my last shop now if you're a beginner or even an intermediate woodworker building a cab cinet seems like it's Out Of Reach and it's very intimidating but this design is so easy you don't need a whole lot of special tools um the one trick is is there is some intricate math involved if you want standardized drawers that can move around the good news is is we made all of these in a plan that you can download immediately and if you want to build this or hack this and modify it for your needs this is super easy I can't imagine spending $120 per cabinet on draw Hardware go check it out now that first cabinet you saw me building was the Prototype just to work at all the math and once I got that squared away I was able to build all the other cabinets really quickly and I was eager to line them up to get a glimpse in person on what my new cabinets would look like in space now here's how I made that jig I ripped a piece of plywood that was the exact thickness of my spacing and I just glued a reference piece 90° after that I glued another piece of scrap on the top of and bottom to reference the front edge of where the false fronts would be I wasn't sure if this jig would be square and accurate but I did all of the remaining five cabinets using this and they were perfect every time it's also really satisfying making a little jig like this on the Fly and at work and if you wanted to make cabinets like this you could stack them and have a tall set of cabinets with all kinds of drawers now when I first started building cabinets one of the things that confused me for a long time was how to do the toe kicks and a lot of times you'll see people just cut them out of the side of the cabinet I don't like to do that and I first got this idea from watching this no-name beginner YouTuber Mark spagnolia I think is his name and he showed how you just build a different base that's shallower and so this is what I'm doing here is I'm building my toekick separately couple of reasons why you want to do this first it's just a cleaner look and you don't have to take a jigsa or a band saw to the sides of your cabinets but most importantly it's way easier to level this base and then set all of your cabinets on that then to cut out toe kicks on each one of your cabinets and then you have to level all of your cabinets individually now my garage floor slops quite a bit and for a good reason this is actually what you want in case you have an unfortunate water leak we're not going to talk about that you want water to drain outside so the way you go about this is with shims at first all I had was some wooden shims and I didn't have enough so I was going to have to go to the store and buy some more and that's when my friend Jason Bent told me that I should probably get composite shims I asked him why and he said they're more consistent and I never thought about the inconsistency of wood shims but he was totally right I may have overdone it on the shims I call this chapter shim for the shims that stuck out I just used my oscillating tool to cut them they were pretty easy and like a kid on Christmas I wanted to see what my cabinets look like so I temporarily plac them all on there and look at that Gap I mean probably most garages are going to have a gap like this but I will show you a way to fix this it's really easy I found this scrap piece of plywood that I brought from my last house that was living outside at one point and started to grow mold or mushrooms you can see right there so instead of throwing it away I figured I could just scribe this by placing it flat on the floor placing my tracksaw on that line and then I just cut it easy I clamped the other side in place took the offcut scribed it again and with the magic of YouTube and check this out now ideally you'd probably want to use quter inch sheet of plywood or something for this but this is all I had so I used my 3M sander with extract sandpaper and I quickly sanded off what I think was a mushroom fungus growing on this plywood a little glue and some clamps and maybe slightly one or two extra brad nails let me know if you go overkill on the brad nails as well pretty awesome if you ask me couldn't even tell if the floor was uneven now this end I will fix with a end panel I'll show you that in a little bit but man shim City never looks so good and in case we ever sell this house which at some point we probably will I left a little note here in case someone ever tears this out I want them to know who's responsible for this now's the time that I've been waiting for is to finally install the cabinets so I can get to making stuff now that end does not look great and before I fix that we're going to clamp all of the cabinets together and make sure they're level which they are now I will screw them all together and then after that's done I will screw them into the studs going through the stretchers using some shims to make up the difference between the drywall I don't know about you but I need more clamps all right so if you have a Keen Eye you probably noticed that there was some rough drywall repair behind where my upper cabinets are going to go on a whim I cut a small hole to see if there was any insulation in this part of the garage and there is none and so I wanted to take this time to put insulation in it so that in the future I don't have to rip these cabinets out just to insulate this part of the garage now this is probably not how you want to do it but my dad and I just cut out a section behind where the upper cabinets would go we slid in some fiberglass bats and then we patched it up you can't even tell I did anything right a random troll commented and said I should probably tape and bed the joints for maximum protection but that sounds like a lot of work so I put a poll on Instagram asking if I should duct tape it or tape and bed it and wouldn't you know the internet wants to see more duct tap tape content on YouTube and from an airflow insulation standpoint I don't really know if this duct tape is going to functionally do anything for me but the internet decided so let me know what you think and boy if anyone buys this house and they take these cabinets off they're in for an incredible surprise now before I made a single cut I made sure that all my cuts would be behind where my upper cabinets are so that this nonsense would be covered a few months ago while my family was out of town we had a waterline burst and it flooded my shop for days causing $80,000 in Damages I regret not having a comprehensive system like simply safe because if I did I would have been notified immediately of the issue and we could have worked to have neighbors shut the water off for us this is a water sensor and it's easy to install here's how fast it works if you have a water heater in your house or shop this is a must we're putting these everywhere there is a potential water failure in our last house we had three different Di y security and camera systems duct taped together and that solution literally didn't work for our property this time around we're choosing comprehensive security for the whole home that has advanced sensors and cameras to detect threats from break-ins to fires floods and more Simply Safe even has a new Smart Alarm indoor security camera that when paired with 24/7 lifeguard protection Simply Safe agents can now see speak to and Detour Intruders so you don't have to you're not the only person who travels in the holidays you know who else does the sticky Bandits and worse the wet Bandits now is the time to ensure the safety of your home your family and the packages you are ordering online unlike traditional home security systems Simply Safe never locks you into a long-term contract or charges hidden fees save 40% on your Simply Safe security system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring and get your first month free visit simplysafe docomo works to customize yours there's no safe like simplysafe now it was time to make the DIY laminate counter which I've never done before I noticed some dark clouds so in order to avoid another I Told You So moment I went ahead and cut this MDF in half this is a 10t long piece of MDF it was really heavy using the track saw I was able to just trim off the ends to exactly 10 ft I may have forgot to turn on the vacuum using the parallel guides again I was able to dial in the exact width that I want this counter to be which is 24 in and referencing one of the edges I was able to trim both sides of the other side and then I fli that around and trimmed the other side that makes total sense I've seen a lot of people on social media make their own counters using black for Mica and this was the most stressful part of the build because this 5x1 12 sheet of black laminant was $150 and using contact cement you have one shot now I was really worried about cutting myself with this and I didn't have a scoring blade so I figured I could probably use my track saww and it worked out great I even invented this new hop skip track saww cutting method my strategy here was to laminate the ends on first and then the front edge and then at the very end once I was comfortable I would put the top on I stared at this piece of laminate for a couple of hours thinking things through watching YouTube videos on how to do it and I had to call in backup I mentioned to my dad that I was doing this he asked if I wanted help I said sure and he drove over that night and there's no way that I could have done this successfully without him it's a pretty straightforward process you put contact cement on the back of your laminate and then on your substrate I needed to do three coats on each you let them dry until they're pretty tacky as soon as they touch they're stuck now if you're thinking three coats really look at how the this MDF soaks up this contact cement now in real time I thought it was crazy but looking back at It sped up I am amazed I left the sheets about a/4 in proud all the way around so that I could come with my trim router which is upside down to show you which way you should actually do it and cut it now doing this long 10ft piece by myself I'm sure Pros know a trick on how to do it but there was no way that I was going to do this successfully the first time by myself and having extra C of hands totally helped also I think I'm going bald that's fun welcome to 40 battery change and if you're ever doing this eye protection ear protection nose protection this stuff is nasty my dad brought a file with him that has a name that I'm not allowed to say on YouTube now this is a cool trick that I've seen on social media and I've never tried it's you take painters tape and you make a v on top of your paint can or contact cement can and then you pour it which makes it way easier but the coolest thing and I'll show you at the end is when you pull the tape off your Rim is perfectly clean which means you can resal this for later use I just poured this straight on the MDF and tried to roll as fast as I can like this is real time I haven't sped this video up actually I did speed it up uh but we went really really fast we placed a bunch of these slats on top of the contact cement after it had dried which would allow us to temporarily place in a line the laminate top and then one by one from the middle working outwards we can pull the slats and make contact all the way down now this is my first time doing this and given that it is my first time I think it turned out pretty well but what the pros say is you start in the middle and then you work your way out to the other sides and after all of that stress of literally thinking about this all day hoping that I didn't mess it up cuz it would be a really expensive mistake it worked out until I went to rout the edges and ladies and gentlemen I have I think what is either a tip for you or an opportunity for you to tell me what I did wrong this entire counter turned out Flawless except for the edge and I think what happened was that I was pushing the bearing too hard but in this shot it doesn't look like I'm pushing hard at all but if I'll show you a close-up here in a moment of some markings that made it all the way around the edge where the router bit barely cut into the laminate when trimming this took all evening to do because we took our time I think we ended at about 10:30 at night clean lid check that out that tape trick is awesome I found some half inch plywood scraps that I placed up against the in panel that needs to be covered and this Notch right here is for the baseboard I measured roughly where I need to cut out and I took some double-sided tape made in the USA and I made a temporary fence so that I could take my oscillating tool and cut this out because I hate jigsaws do you like tear out how's that tear out no one will see it I used a file to clean up a couple of the edges so that I could sneak up on the fit I then used the pencil just to scribe in place where everything went it only took me about 5 to 10 minutes to cut this side panel so that it would fit perfectly and of course I had to put a special message written in glue on the side of this panel before clamping it and Brad nailing it in and when I put everything together you don't see any of the shims you don't see the bottom base it matches perfectly with the counter now I had about 36 drawer bottoms to sand and prep and this was a very satisfying point of the build where I tested the fit of all of the bottoms which are also the runners because of how the drawer is designed now one of the goals for this build was to build it without any hard Ware and I did test out some handle options that would just involve cutting a hole but I didn't like them and I really wanted something physical to pull on so I found several 3D printed design options that flexed a little bit too much and I suspected that they wouldn't hold up to use so I am cheating a little bit and I found these metal drawer PES but they're about $150 each they're really slick solid and cheap so this is the part where I put on some headphones and I just went through a pocket hole craze of making all of the drawer Parts I'm sorry draw it's pronounce draw now the easiest way that I found to assemble pocket hole screws is to just put them in parallel clamps like you would if you were gluing things up and that way you can sneak up on the fit and then just drive the screws home I've tried tons of other clamps and they seem to just never get it quite right let me know if you have found a better way to assemble lots of pocket screw joints in a different way but for me right now this is the best thing that I've come up with this is the part of the build where a lot of the payoff is starting to happen because I'm seeing my brain child in real time in reality in the physical world and things are all working now when it came time to add the bottoms I was going to make a jig but I thought that this would be the easiest and I just measured Center on one of the drawers and since all of these sorry draws are exactly the same this works on all 36 draws there we go with one of the draws marked at Center I just transferred all the measurements so I could line up the center line that I did in a similar Fashion on all of the bottoms 36 times rinse and repeat I'm not going to bore you with it the first couple I did I was really tenative and I made sure I lined it up perfectly and very gently put two clamps on and flipped it over and as I got comfortable you'll see how I just adjusted now I'm not using glue on purpose in case I ever need to repair these basically what I did was I flipped these over so that they're upside down I put one clamp in place I lined up that first line I tacked in one side I flipped it around squared it up tacked that side and then I ran Nails all the way through on the sides now one trick that really helped is I took a combination square and I measured the distance that the draw bottom overhangs and I was able to transfer that onto the bottom of the drawer draw and that gave me a visual reference on where to nail the bottom on here you can see how this really works now after 35 draws assembled I didn't miss a nail once and this was the last drawer draw and as you can see when I turn this over I missed a nail on the very last one I'm kidding it was perfect I can't believe it I didn't shank a nail one time has that ever happened to you I spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle the handles and while you could cut out a shape which would look amazing you would have to cut out that shape twice because this is a false front so with these metal handles that only downside is that there needs to be a slight recess cut out on the back of the false front so that the false front will sit flat against the draw front I thought this was going to be a pain but actually it was really easy setting up a router table that is just a really simple DIY router table that I made using some stop blocks setting the depth of cut using the hardware itself I was able to cut out this mortise similar to like you'd see on a door now normally my perfectionism would get to me and would force me me to cut the short and then finish it up with a chisel so that all the corners are square but this is week three of building these it takes a project about 10 times longer when you're videoing for YouTube I realized no one is going to see the back of these false fronts and so I just routed them a little bit deeper so that I really wouldn't have to take a chisel to square them up I am really pleased and impressed with how slick these $11.50 metal drawer PES look I know these are shop cabinets and they're kind of supposed to be a little sloppy but I can't stop looking at them I mean I'm I'm really happy with myself and proud of the work that I did four years ago I bought the plans for these upper cabinets from fix this build that I love them so much I'm building them for a second time for this new setup they are the easiest upper cabinets to build I built four units to Ft worth in half a day for under $200 my favorite part about them is that the inside shelf is half the depth which allows for you to utilize the back of the doors for storage and if you use an adjustable shelf pin jig you can customize the placement of every horizontal shelf you put in the cabinet I'll link to Brad's video and plans in the good old dbox and here's a tip for installing cabinets by yourself if you screw onto the wall a horizontal board like a straight 2x4 if you can find one then you can trans for the locations of the studs to the back of the cabinets pre-drill for your screws and with one hand hold the cabinet in place while you screw into the studs now instead of using a temporary ledge like I just explained I went ahead and installed my plywood backsplash first so that I could use that to set the cabinets on in my next video I'll show a bunch of cool shop tool holders that I will screw onto this plywood backer to hold my most used tools pegboard is for children subscribe if you want to see that now for the six people still watching I have a secret that I want to let you in on that you're going to love before I spill the beans on that let's see if I failed or succeeded in building these cabinets for under $900 the amount I would have spent on the cheapest drawer slides alone the cool thing about this design is that a single lower cabinet unit with six drawers takes one sheet of 3/4 and one sheet of/ in plywood I built six of them so I needed six sheets of each size of plywood most of the plywood that I bought was the higher grade domestic 3/4 in material for $80 each now while it was basically a dollar more than what I found at the big box stores the quality of this was so much greater so even though I spent the same amount I got significantly better material however I bought some of the cheaper import plywood for $40 to use on the upper cabinets and if I had to do this over again I would have bought that for everything because it was just as good as the expensive kind just with a lower grade near and I don't really care about that if you include the cost of the MDF black laminate drawer PS screws glue contact cement J roller and this Craig plywood carrier that saved my back I spent a total of $1,222 182 on the lower cabinets alone I guess I failed the $900 test but it is cheaper than if I went the bloom route now if I had used the cheaper import plywood instead of the $80 domestic plywood that total would have come to $981 and I would have been a lot closer to my goal now this was outside of the scope of this video but as I was building it I decided to build these upper cabinets throw them in there at the tail end and I spent a total of $221 on those cabinets which included drawer poles and these LED lights so my total cost for this entire 10t wall of upper lower cabinets with a counter and LED lights is $1,444 43 now while I technically broke the budget and didn't meet my goal it is cheaper than if I were to have built these cabinets and bought all of those drawer slides all right so here's the payoff for those of you who are still watching did you really think that I was going to put duct tape on the drywall heck no when you weren't watching I actually tape embedded the drywall seams because I'm not an animal now the cool thing about this is if you look in the comments below all the people who didn't watch this end and who are slightly triggered by me using duct tape they're probably going to comment about it so if you want a good laugh you can go to the comment section and look for all those people who are roasting me for using duct tape or praising me for using duct tape and all those people commenting that way you and I will both know that they didn't watch to the end and if you're watching to the end and you see those comments would you leave a comment and somewhere in the comment use the snorkel emoji that way I and everyone else will know that you made it to the deep end if you want to build cabinets like these and support the channel check the link below if you like the vibe join my daddy's tribe on patreon woo
