Building Cabinets for Utter Dummies

upper cabinet parts

One of the staffers at the Antisocial Network spent some time working in a custom cabinet factory, and he rarely lets you forget it. If the truth be told, he has a pretty good eye for what means quality in cabinets and what means schlock. He's the same way when it comes to freelance articles about cabinets, and today's far from the first time he's weighed in on the ratio of quality to schlock. He checked the HomeSteady.com post "How to Build Upper Kitchen Cabinets"¹ on his scale, and let's just say that Cameron Easey didn't score well.

It seems that Easey's only exposure to kitchen cabinets is to have put the dishes away after his mother washed them. It's for darned sure he's never built a cabinet or, for that matter, anything more complicated than a birdhouse (and probably not that). Let's observe some of Cameron's more clueless statements.

• "Wood choices include pine, cherry, oak and walnut. You also can use laminated particle board." – No such animal as "laminated particle board." There is MDF-cored plywood and MDF with a laminate (melamine) veneer, perhaps that's what Easey meant?
• "[The length of] Typical upper cabinets will... vary depending on the length of the wall, such as 36 inches." – No, idiot, typical lengths range from about twelve to about 50 inches, but you combine two or more cabinets to cover the length of the wall.
• "Measure... the wood boards... Two pieces will need to be 12 inches by 36 inches for the top and bottom. Two more pieces will need to be 12 inches by 30 inches for the sides. A third piece will need to be 30 inches by 36 inches that will be used for the back." – Our DotD failed to account for the thickness of the lumber when assigning a width to the back. And "boards" 12 inches wide?
• "Place the four 12 inch wide pieces... together to form the shape of a box. Drill three pilot holes ink [sic] each corner with the power drill. – In "each corner"? Duh.

And finally, here are Cameron's steps for creating a face frame:

• "Measure and cut the ¾-inch by 2-inch boards for the face of the cabinet. Two boards will need to be 36 inches and three boards will need to be 26 inches."
• "Place the two 36-inch boards on the top and bottom of the front of the cabinet and secure them with finish nails."
• "Place two of the 26-inch boards on the ends of the cabinet and secure them with the finish nails."
• "Measure and mark the center of the cabinet with the tape measure on the top and bottom of the front face. Place the last 26-inch board in the center of the cabinet and secure it with the finish nails."

With all due respect to Easey's "15 years of customer service" and his BA in PolySci, everything he wrote is pure and utter bull. The dimensions are bogus; the assembly instructions are bogus; and, most telling, the way he wants to build the face frame is laughably stupid. No wonder Cameron is collecting another Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_6716534_build-upper-kitchen-cabinets.html

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DDIY - CABINETS