Building Pantry Cabinets with Pull Out Trays

hey guys i'm matt from mwa woodworks and in this video i'm going to upgrade this cluttered disorganized pantry space and turn it into this much taller deeper and a lot more organized stay tuned and i'll show you how i did it so this project is just the beginning of what's going to be a multi-step process and updating the pantry in my house i plan on adding more cabinets and counter space later but my wife and i decided that we really needed to tackle food storage first the storage we have now is just some basic wooden shelving that's not super deep it tends to get cluttered pretty easily and items get mixed together because there's nothing separating them the worst part though is that the larger items tend to stack up on the floor in front and limit your ability to walk around and grab stuff off the shelves so from that we learned that we definitely wanted deeper cabinets and the ones that i'm going to be making now are going to be 18 inches deep we also want a better way to separate and keep track of all the different items that we store here canned goods snack foods pasta etc to solve that i'm going to be adding 10 pull out drawers to the lower half of these cabinets and the upper half is just going to be open shelving for larger items like paper towels and bulk buys i'm also making these cabinets tall i'm going to go ahead and use the full length of the eight foot sheets of plywood here i've got nine foot ceilings in our home so they're going to easily fit inside the pantry and better use that wall space that wasn't being used before now after breaking down the plywood i go ahead and cut the sides to final width basically i'm just cutting off the factory edge here to give nice clean sharp edges as i mentioned before i'm making these eight feet high so i don't need to cut these sides to length next i need to go ahead and cut the top bottom dividers and the shelves for each of the cabinets and i'm doing this with my track saw at the mft it's also really nice to use a rolling support here to help support the long plywood strips as i cut them down and guys that's it all the cabinet parts are cut and ready for joinery for joinery i'm using dados and to cut those i'm using an undersized plywood bit this is a special router bit that matches the width of plywood since a sheet of three quarter inch plywood isn't really three quarters of an inch i begin by cutting rabbets in each end of the sides to hold the top and the bottom this is pretty easy to do at the router table in my table saw because i get to use the entire width of the table saw for support now you can also do this job with a handheld router and a straight edge for me personally i always try to use the router table for any operation that i can because i find this way to be safer and i can more easily be accurate with my cut now the last thing i need to do is make this dado down the middle to hold the divider between the drawer section of the cabinets and the shelf section on top i also sanded the edges of the parts that are going to go into these dadoes to remove some of that finish and allow them to be glued together more easily and now it's time for assembly i just add glue to the dados and add the center divider first now i'm also going to countersink and screw these together for two reasons the practical reason is that the screws were going to act like clamps while the glue dries and this means that i don't have to use clamps and wait around for those glue joints to dry on their own i can just keep assembling and the other reason is that because of how these cabinets are going to be installed these sides are never going to be seen so i don't have to worry about having ugly screw holes in the final piece i'm also adding some right angle clamps here to keep everything nice and square while i assemble and then move on to adding the top and the bottom these are done in the exact same way as the center divider just add some glue and then screw in from the sides and then i'm just going to set this first cabinet aside to dry while i tackle the second cabinet and you can see here how nice and tall these are going to be now the second cabinet goes exactly the way the first one did i did end up using one clamp because this pesky center dado was a bit tight and i had to drive it home with a little persuasion all right so later on in the day after the glue had time to dry i went ahead and added my shelf pin holes to the top half of the cabinets i really could have done this before assembly but doing it now with the cabinets still open in the back is just as easy and i really like using this little craig shelf pin jig for this job it has an indexing pin that allows you to make a set of holes and then line yourself up with that pin to extend that set of holes down as far as you need to go now to finish off assembly i just need to add the backs i'm using half inch plywood to make these nice and strong and i'm just screwing these down from the back side this is just the easiest way to do it because the edges of these plywoods are not going to be seen and this way i'm maximizing the space inside the cabinet versus say insetting the back into a rabbet or a groove on the back i really just wanted these to be quick and easy to assemble so i could get them out of the way and focus on all the drawers i need to make but before i get to those drawers there was one small detail that i needed to take care of and that is adding edge banding to the front edge of my shelves i only need to do the front edge because the other edges are never going to be seen now for this job i'm going to be using iron on edge banding and that's really simple to apply and i only have four total shelves so this went by pretty fast i just ironed it on and then i used this little roller to make sure that it was firmly attached i can then trim the ends and use this fancy double-edged trimmer to remove the excess on the sides okay now with the cabinet carcasses all done i'm moving on to the drawers now my favorite drawer material is always hard maple it has a nice clean look no matter whether you're pairing it with hardwood or a painted surface and it's super durable i begin by chopping everything down to rough length at the miter saw chopping and chopping and chopping and chopping 40 total drawer sides yikes now after all my parts were cut i flattened one side of each one at the jointer and then i squared up one edge to that flat side after that i could just run everything through the planer until i reached the thickness of 5 8 of an inch for the two sides and the back and three quarters of an inch for the drawer fronts i could then go back to the table saw and cut each part to final width and i'm making the drawer sides four inches high and the drawer fronts six inches high finally i cut all the parts to final length using my miter gauge now i want to show you two different ways to construct the type of drawers that i'm building for these cabinets the first way is to use what's called a locking rabbet joint and this method can be done entirely using the table saw and nothing else i first need to cut a groove into all the sides like this i'm using a table saw blade with flat teeth so that the bottom of the groove is flat and clean then in the drawer fronts i need to make a series of cuts that will start with making a vertical cut then i make a horizontal cut to create a little tongue and the whole thing fits together like this pretty easy and also satisfying when it all fits together nicely now you might ask about the top of that where the joints sticking up above the sides but i'm gonna tell you how i'm taking care of that here in just a minute the last thing i need to do here is to cut grooves in all the parts to accept the drawer bottoms you can see here how the quarter inch plywood fits really nicely into that groove you don't want this groove to be super tight but you also don't want it to be really loose so that the drawer bottom rattles all over the place now for the back of the drawers i'm using pocket screws and i'm going to explain exactly why i chose this route in a minute i promise i have a plan hey guys i would just like to take a minute to say thank you for watching this video and if you find a lot of value in it i would certainly appreciate it if you subscribe to my channel also make sure to hit that bell icon to be notified every time i release new content me being able to continue to make videos like this depends entirely on your support also if you see me using something in this video and you'd like to check it out for yourself always make sure to check the description below because that's where i leave links to the products that i use in my videos thank you once again guys now let's continue on with the build now the second method i'm going to show you for attaching these drawer fronts is with dominoes now you can sub in dowels here if you don't own a domino but i'm going to use a domino i need to plunge into the sides to make my mortises and i'm using this awesome domino dock that my friend ramon valdez makes it cradles the domino perfectly and makes this process super easy now ramon sells these little domino docks and i'm going to go ahead and leave a link in the description below if you want one for your shop and for the fronts i need to mortise into the face of the board instead of the end so my vice helps out with this job now you'll notice i'm using a second drawer front as a backer board to add more surface to balance the domino on and i just extend my reference lines to the sides and make the cuts the drawer bottoms are going to be made out of quarter inch ply and this is pretty easy to cut up at the table saw after ripping it down i can just cut it up into finished dimensions and after all that chopping milling joinery and cutting at the table saw i've got a whopping 50 drawer parts for the drawer fronts i wanted to do something a little different i wanted to add a pull to the top edge these drawers won't have false fronts and i'm not going to be putting any hardware on them so this is going to be a great solution you can see here that i made this template from plywood and i'm just going to stick it to the drawer front using two-sided tape i go ahead and remove most of the waste at the bandsaw and you can also use a jigsaw for this if you don't have a band saw now i'm using the template as a guide here but i'm staying about an eighth of an inch away from it so i don't accidentally cut into it now once the bulk of the waste is removed i use a flush trim bit at the router to run it against the template and make everything nice and clean so the first step in assembling these drawers is going to be to glue the two sides to the front just glue and clamps and we're good the locking rabbet version goes together exactly the same way just gluing clamps after sanding all the drawer assemblies i finished them with general finishes high performance this is a water-based top coat that protects the wood but it doesn't add any color at all if you look here the drawers on the left are unfinished and the drawers on the right have been sprayed already other than a little more grain definition the finished drawers don't look much different in terms of color than the raw wood oh and if you don't have a sprayer you can apply this finish with a foam brush just like i'm doing here once the drawer parts are finished i install the drawer bottoms and then screw on the back with pocket screws i chose to do it this way with the pocket screws because the drawer bottoms were already pre-finished and i didn't need to spray those once the drawers were all assembled i could then add the drawer slides now i like lining up my drawer slides with the bottom of the drawers and that allows me to install them using this method i just set the drawer slide against the drawer bottom on a flat surface and extend the slide out so that you can see where to screw the drawers into place easy peasy the last thing i need to do is make the face frame and the trim for these cabinets again i'm going to use hard maple for this and i just rip these boards into strips and plane everything down to final thickness for the face frames i'm using dominoes again a lot of people use pocket screws for the face frames and that's a great way to do it since those are never going to be seen but assembling with dominoes couldn't be easier just glue and clamp everything up the only downside here is that you have to let it dry before you can do anything else with it now for the only side of the cabinet that's going to be visible in this installation i'm going to do a 4-inch rail and style trim now since this is just decorative and is going to be screwed to the side of the cabinets i'm just going to go ahead and skip the dominoes all together and just glue it it doesn't really need a lot of strength here so this is not going to make a difference now once the trim was out of the clamps i just broke the edges a tiny bit by using a chamfer bit and my palm router now i'm talking like a 64th of an inch here not much at all just enough to make sure that the edges aren't sharp after that i just screwed the trim to the side of the cabinet from the inside now since i'm painting these cabinets i just went ahead and added a little wood filler over the screw holes that i can go back and sand later before i paint this is going to make these screw holes invisible in the final piece i also made sure the trim was perfectly flush with the sides of the cabinets by using a flush trim bit on that as well now one other thing i needed to do before installation was make a little base for the cabinets out of two by fours i milled them down to size and i assembled them with pocket screws the cabinets are going to sit on top of this base and i'll nail the base trim to these sides now for the cabinets i'm going to go ahead and spray them with a shellac based primer and then used sherwin-williams kim aqua plus for the top coat this finish dries fast and is really hard and durable and it's one of my favorite finishes for painted cabinets okay fast forward and i have the cabinets painted and ready to install i set the two cabinets onto the base like so and then position everything perfectly lining it up at the edges i then fastened the two cabinets together with screws next i laid the face frame out on the kitchen floor and added glue waiting until my wife left the house so i didn't earn myself any dirty looks i just spread the glue and then i carefully took it into the pantry i positioned everything and began adding pin nails and clamps now these thin strips of face frame were like spaghetti and had warped a little bit so i added plenty of clamping pressure to help keep everything firmly attached while the glue dried i then added the center pieces of the face frame with pin nails and glue all right fast forward again and the face frame is all dry and in place and now i can just move these cabinets into final position i then securely fasten the cabinets to the wall using cabinet screws making sure to screw into the studs in the wall i could then begin installing all the drawers starting from the top now my favorite way of doing this is making a spacer out of plywood or mdf to perfectly align the slides on each side and once i got both top drawers installed i could take that piece of plywood back to the table saw and cut it down for the next set of drawer slides i just worked my way down until all 10 drawers were installed now you'll see here that i added progressive amounts of space between the drawers as i move down to allow for larger items to be stored there really you can arrange these drawers with any size gap that you want to fit your own needs i then just added shelf pin clips and went ahead and added the shelves to the top and the next day i came back and added the trim to the base lastly i went ahead and added some quarter round to the side where the cabinet's face frame met the wall to hide any gaps and that's it last thing to do is begin filling these cabinets well hey guys i really hope you enjoyed this video and most importantly i hope you learned something from it now if you did i would certainly appreciate that thumbs up and also leave me a comment below to let me know what you thought also make sure to hit that logo icon to subscribe to my channel i would really love to have you on board and also hit that bell icon to be notified every time i release a new video speaking of videos here's a couple other ones that i think you guys would really enjoy so please check those out and until next time have fun in the shop

Channel: MWA Woodworks

Views: 48,013

Rating: 4.9789472 out of 5

Keywords: mwa woodworks, pantry organization, pantry makeover, diy pantry cabinet, custom pantry cabinet, pantry remodel before and after, walk in pantry remodel, walk in pantry organization, walk in pantry build, how to build a pantry cabinet, tall pantry cabinet, pantry cabinet lots of storage, upgrade pantry cabinet, pantry cabinets with pull out drawers, pantry cabinets without doors, pantry cabinets with drawers, diy kitchen pantry cabinets

Id: zL4TgtY_Nrc

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021