How to Build a GLASS DOOR CABINET with DRAWER

[Music] hey friends it's shara from woodshop diaries and in today's video we're going to be building this glassdoor display cabinet now side note it's not actually glass it's acrylic so to your surprise i did not build this project out of plywood like i normally do this time i use some solid white oak from weber lumber now this project is kind of bittersweet because i've been wanting to build this for a really long time but behind the scenes i had so many things going on that caused me to need to finish this project as quickly as possible rushing through a project is never the best way to do things so had i had more time there are definitely some things that i would have done different i know it sounds crazy but sometimes in this job an extra day turns into being a week behind and i just didn't have a weak despair so it is what it is anyway i'll be discussing all the issues that i ran into trying to rush through this project and the things that i would do differently throughout the video so if you're ready to dive in let's go if you'd like the dimensions and project details i'm sharing the building plans plus all the tools and materials in the video description now i mentioned that i built this project from white oak weber lumber provided me with the lumber here but it all came in one by sixes and one by fours six foot long so i had to glue them together to make the panels and rip them apart to make the doors and the trim of course as an alternative you could also avoid the glue ups and just use plywood if you preferred i love white oak but i'm kind of picky about grain pattern i like straight green best and the wavy swirly stuff just isn't really my favorite so i picked through my boards to find my favorite pieces to glue up for the sides since these will be the most visible parts of the cabinet i turn them down a little longer than i wanted my cabinet to be then lay them out and glue them together i glued up three long pieces for each side panel then repeated the process with some shorter boards for the top and bottom panels of the main cabinet now i know i could have used dowels to help line everything up a little bit but i didn't after these were dry i sanded them to remove all the glue squeeze out and to flatten them out i skipped filming that part because it was literally just like hours of me using an orbital sander and there are more important things to cover with the time in this video i trimmed each panel to final size using my circular saw and craig accu-cut then i had my first laps of judgment i am building this cabinet out of white oak now i actually got enough white oak that i can make the back of the cabinet a solid panel of white oak but this is three quarter inch thick it's incredibly heavy so my first change of plans was swapping from a three quarter inch solid wood back to a quarter inch plywood back i have this piece i couldn't find any white or red oak quarter inch plywood in stock anywhere and i'm gonna be honest i don't know what kind of wood this is so i'll try what i already have in my shop personally it's not gonna bother me i'm going to eat these words shortly because my original plan involved using solid wood i had planned to cut a dado into the cabinet box sides to install the back to allow for movement however i don't know why it never occurred to me that since i was switching to a plywood back a shallow rabbet would have been fine so i could have just glued this up without the back panel and just waited for the oak sheet to come in if i had ordered some all that said i cut my dados in the cabinet sides for the back panel and if i were to do this over i would definitely just rabbet the back edge after the unnecessary dados were cut i started laying out and marking my pieces to drill dowel holes i assembled this cabinet box using dowels the issue with this is that i didn't count how many dowel pins that i had and i didn't have enough to do both the cabinet box and the doors later so in hindsight i really should have just ordered more dowel pins before building this but had i had counted first and realized that i wouldn't have had enough i would have opted to use pocket holes and screws for the cabinet as these won't be seen in the finished project and kept the dowels to use on the doors later but we'll get there when we get there i marked and drilled dowel holes at each corner and carefully labeled each piece so that i knew how to assemble it when i got ready to glue up assembling the cabinet was incredibly stressful and required two people which is just another reason to use pocket holes in this case but what's done is done i added the top and the bottom then slid in the back panel and added the last side i used some pipe clamps to kind of help push everything together and once i had the whole box together i clamped everything nice and tight until the glue was dry glue was everywhere everyone was mad it wasn't a pleasant experience but we survived [Music] at this point i was still contemplating my back panel ordeal so while i over thought things i went ahead and started gluing up some more panels to use as the shelves later while these dried i decided that i wasn't okay with the underlayment and i went on a mission to find some oak plywood long story short i wasted an entire day driving around but i did get my sheet of oak plywood so i'm gonna eat my words here and i said that i thought that this would look okay as is and it i mean it does it doesn't look horrible but i put it together and i just i wasn't feeling it i found some quarter inch red oak plywood now it's not white oak but the oak green pattern i think will look a lot better than this and i think in the end i'll be glad that i did this but that said i've already got the dados cut and i need to remove this back panel and it's going to be kind of difficult to remove this back panel with dados to replace it i decided to cut out the top dado and slide the old panel out then i could slide the new one back in place i started cutting out this dado with an oscillating saw but it was burning the wood so i swapped to a jigsaw then i swapped these panels out now while i am happy that i did this this did put me another day behind my already rushed build but the cabinet box looked good so pros and cons i cut and sanded a shelf from the glue up that i was working on earlier and drilled pocket holes into the ends before adding this shelf to the cabinet i glued a scrap strip onto the bottom of the cabinet this is just a trim piece then i cut two pieces of 1x2 to go on the sides these serve two purposes they're just an extra trim piece but they will also push the drawer in enough to clear the hinges once i add the door i used these as spacer blocks to install the shelf using pocket hole screws and then i added some glue onto the sides of these and glued them into the sides of the cabinet between the shelf and the bottom trim in order to mount the drawer slides later i needed some spacer blocks installed here to come flush to the inside of these trim pieces so i glued some scrap 2x2 blocks in on each side i didn't bother with screws although they really wouldn't have hurt anything then i moved on to building the base since i was working with one by material i needed to glue these together to make the two by twos for the base i ripped some strips off the shelf glue ups because they needed to be trimmed down narrower anyway then i glued these together to make two by twos after the glue dried i clean them up on the table saw and trimmed them to length on the miter saw then i laid everything out on the workbench and started marking for dowels i marked each joint where to drill the dowel holes and labeled everything carefully i mentioned earlier how i wish that i had used pocket holes on the cabinet versus using dowels but in this case i am glad that i went with dowels i think if i had used screws here i would have had a lot of trouble with them running into each other at the corners i drilled out my dowel holes using my dowel jig then proceeded to glue everything up again glue ups are stressful and messy and not at all my favorite but i survived this one too to make sure that this stayed flat i actually clamped everything up on my table saw since i know it's a flat surface this was actually pretty stressful too because i was getting glue all over the top of my table saw and i quickly scraped it off after everything was clamped after sanding the entire base to remove all the glue i installed a rabbeting bit into my router to run along the outside edge this is totally optional but it just adds kind of a nice detail and a reveal between the base and the cabinet my only advice is if you do this to make sure that you install your dowels far enough from the top edge to not route over them don't ask me why i would think to tell you that since i was working with solid wood here i decided to install the base similar to how you would install table tops using these figure eight brackets if you were building this from plywood i'd probably suggest just screwing the base into the bottom of the cabinet but in this case since i'm using solid wood i wanted to just make sure that i allowed for wood movement i installed four of these brackets onto my base then i installed the base onto the bottom of the cabinet notice that the base actually sticks out the front about three quarters of an inch this is so that it's flush to the front of the doors when they're added later speaking of doors that's where i headed next i ripped down and trimmed the pieces to make two identical doors i laid out all my pieces on my workbench and made sure everything kind of fit together and this is when i realized that i didn't have enough dowel pins to assemble both doors i drove to town and i looked for 3 8 inch dowel pins with no look and ordering some was going to take a couple of days so i decided to use pocket holes and just plug the holes with some oak dials that i had this was definitely not ideal but in the grand scheme of things it wasn't a big deal if i had foreseen this i would have definitely saved the dials that i used on the cabinet box for the doors and use pocket holes on the cabinet instead but this isn't the end of the road here i actually think now that the project is done whenever i get some more time i'm going to rip some really thin strips of leftover white oak and add kind of like a veneer on the back side of these doors that will cover these plugs but still look solid for now i just sanded it smooth and moved on for the quote-unquote glass i actually used plexiglas real glass would be fine but it's a little heavier more fragile and i can't cut it myself so i used the rabbeting bit and cut a rabbet along the inside openings of the doors the same depth as the thickness of my plexiglas i used the chisel to square the corners then i cut my plexiglass to fit inside the rabbets before installing it i built a few more things so that i could apply a finish to everything at once before i installed the glass pieces i was waiting for the drawer slides to come in because i did have to order 12 inch slides but i could go ahead and build the drawer box and just install it as soon as they came in so i cut my drawer box pieces from some scrap plywood and this process is the same one that i use in almost every video i cut dados to install the quarter inch plywood bottom applied iron-on edge banding to the tops and assembled using pocket holes and screws then i cut a drawer front to fit in the opening and i cut my three shelves to length for these shelves i wanted them to be adjustable so i used a shelf pin jig to drill shelf pin holes along the sides of the cabinet i made sure to drill my front holes far enough inset that the shelves would still be able to rest on them since they are quite a bit shallower than the cabinet sides now at this point all of my pieces were cut assembled and ready to finish so i could apply a clear poly to all the pieces separately before putting it all together once the poly had dried i installed the plexiglass panels and again this didn't go as planned either i had actually planned to install these using picture frame turn buttons so that they'd be easily removable for cleaning or if i ever decided to like frost them however once again i didn't have enough so i used some clear glue and just glued these in place i will probably come back later like i mentioned before and cut some thin strips of oak to line the backside of these doors which will cover the plexiglass edges and the pocket hole plugs but for now these pieces are at least in place after the glue was dry i used a concealed hinge jig to drill holes to install concealed hinges for frameless overlay doors then i hung these on the cabinet and adjusted the hinges so that the gap between the doors was about an eighth of an inch oh and i added some simple black knobs to finish things up once the drawer slides finally came in it was time to add the last piece the drawer i install the slides onto the spacer blocks then remove the piece that attaches to the drawer now normally i don't remove this to install my drawer boxes but in this case since the doors were already on i didn't have room to get my drill into the sides to install these in place so i just screwed these brackets to the drawer box separately and then slid it all back in place for the drawer front i measured the gap between the bottom trim and the drawer box and i saw that it was about a quarter of an inch my drawer front should be about an eighth of an inch from the bottom trim so that means it should overhang the bottom edge of the drawer box an eighth of an inch so i removed the drawer box centered the front side to side with an eighth inch overhang on the bottom then screwed this in place from the inside of the drawer box before putting it back in the cabinet i added some painters tape so that i'll be able to pull it back out again after test fitting after i made sure it fit properly i added the knobs took a step back and admired my new build i can't help but feel a little bittersweet about this project although it turned out nice and i'm ultimately happy with it very few things went as planned and i feel like i'd cut a few corners that i wished i hadn't but i'm going to revisit this again when i have some time and touch up the places that i'm not 100 happy with everything is fixable and while this may be complete it's not technically finished you may very well see it again anyway i hope you learned from my mistakes to take your time and enjoy the process of the build i also hope you enjoyed seeing this project come to life thanks so much for watching friends and until next time happy building

Channel: Shara Woodshop Diaries

Views: 30,023

Keywords: display cabinet plans, display cabinet diy, glass door cabinet plans, glass door cabinet plans with drawer, glass door cabinet with drawer, cabinet with glass door plans, cabinet with glass door diy, DIY glass door cabinet, glass door cabinet with storage, glass door cabinet with shelves, DIY cabinet with shelves, diy cabinet with drawer, diy glass door bookcase, diy glass door bookcase with drawer, diy glass door bookshelf with drawer, diy bookshelf with glass doors

Id: lMOC4QJjoQE

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022