Installing Cabinets as Copied by Dummies

 

installing cabinets - note use of clamps

As far as we can tell, many of the freelancing English and Journalism graduates who populated eHow.com were convinced that they could reword  anything quickly and accurately, ending up with a product the equal of their "reference." We're here to tell you that most of them appear to have been sadly mistaken. Today's nominee, Janet Beal, found a perfectly good reference for the question she thought she was answering, but  in the process of performing a classic eHow copy-reword-paste, she blew it. Let's take a look at her SFGate.com post "How to Install Used Cabinets."

There's precious little on the internet about installing used cabinets, but Janet found a post by well-known DIY guru Don Vandervoort about installing cabinets and just stuck in the word "used" wherever she could. In comparing the two versions – Don's original and Janet's cribbed version – we found a few spots where Beal's instructions fall short. We won't bore you with all the details (we suggest going to the original), but a couple of Beal's steps did not sit right. We'll compare Vandervoort's original on the left with Beal's mangled version on the right:

It is imperative to fasten cabinets securely to the wall stud framing behind the wall’s surface material... The screws you use must go through a strong part of the cabinet, such as a support rail that runs along the cabinet back. Every cabinet should be secured by at least three screws that penetrate the wall framing by at least 1 1/2 inches.	...fasten the cabinet to the wall with... 2 inch pan-head cabinet screws or wood screws with cabinet washers
If your cabinet setup includes a corner wall cabinet, install it first, with a helper	Begin installation with the outermost wall cabinet.

Whooo, baby: Anyone following Beal's instructions is gonna have problems! That bit about starting at the outside of the rank of cabinets? Heaven help you if you find that when you get to the corner, you're off by half an inch! And 2-inch pan-head¹ screws? Those will barely penetrate the full thickness of the drywall behind the cabinet, nowhere near sinking 1½" into the studs! They need to be at least 3½" long, preferably 4 inches.

Beal mangles the instructions for screwing adjacent cabinets together as well, telling her readers to,

"Attach cabinets side-by-side, using two 1 1/2 inch screws at the top and bottom of the adjacent side walls..."

That will work for frameless cabinets, though for cabinets with face frames you need to screw thorough the stiles (sides) of the frames using special trim-head screws, which have small, unobtrusive heads. Oh, and you really should align the cabinets and clamp them together begore you screw them together...

So once again, some clueless English major botches instructions for a DIY job because A) she'd never even thought of doing it herself and B) she didn't understand her reference. Oh, yeah, and C): because she's a Dumbass of the Day for the fourth time.

¹ Most people call those washer-head screws or even cabinet screws. A pan-head is somewhat different...

DDIIY - CABINETS