The next phase of this project is to install the 8 wood drawers and drawer glides that I have been storing in my home for many years. If you remember from my earlier posts that we remodeled our kitchen years ago and the kitchen cabinet company sent us 4 incorrectly sized drawers twice, which gave us 8 extra drawers that we could not use in our kitchen.  With the choice of either throwing away or storing until I could find a use for them, I finally put them to good use.

If you remember from the start of this project, I had these 8 24" deep drawers but I wanted these cabinets to be 30" deep. That meant that I need to install some front rails in the cabinets to support the front of the drawer glides. When I was routing the dados in the cabinet sides, I was sure to rout the dado for these front rails. I cut the rails out of 3/4" thick poplar and glued them into these vertical slots.

I then took one of the drawer glides and set it in place on top of another piece of 3/4" plywood as to leave clearance under the bottom most drawer. Having this fixed position for the bottom drawer will help me layout the others above it.

Each drawer glide has a plastic hanger that slides onto the back end of the glide and has 2 bosses that get inserted into 2 registration holes in the back of the cabinet support returns. I need to drill the holes precisely into the back of the cabinet and on the front rails to hold each drawer glide level, straight and evenly spaced.

No better way to figure out the spacing than to turn to xDesign. Instead of opening the whole assembly I previously created to start this project, I thought it would be faster to just model something quick knowing the real world dimensions that I am dealing with here in front of me.

So I quickly modeled the front rail with a basic Extrude feature. I then created a sketch and drew a rectangle representing one of the drawer fronts.  I had already assembled the bottom drawer so that was my datum to calculate the proper spacing. I determined that the screw hole to hold the front for the drawer glide is directly aligned with the bottom edge of the drawer and that first hole is 1 5/8" (1.625") from the bottom edge of the support rail. Each drawer is 3.5" tall.

I then created a Sketch Pattern and entered a spacing dimension of 6" as a starting point. Once I completed the Sketch Pattern, I dimensioned the 2nd drawer to the fixed position of the bottom drawer.  I dimensioned each of the other 2 drawers to their nearest sibling the same way. While still in Sketch, I created an Equation that made the 3rd drawer's spacing dimension equal to the 2nd drawer's spacing dimension. Then did the same for the 4th drawers spacing dimension equal to the 2nd drawer's spacing dimension. This way I can just change the one dimension and it will drive the spacing equally and I can adjust until I am happy with the spacing.

I ultimately decided to space them 5 3/4" (5.75") apart. I added 2 other 'driven' dimensions to the sketch so that I would know the clearance above the top drawer (5 3/8") and the clearance between each drawer (2 1/4") respectively. So, now I have the spacing needed to figure out where to drill all of the holes on the front rail and back for each drawer glide.

I created a new sketch on the narrow face of the support rail in xDesign. First, I drew a small circle to represent the first drill hole that I had already made as my datum which aligns with the bottom of the drawer as descried above. I then drew a rectangle with the dimensions for the plastic Front Hanger. I then determined when the glides are fully assembled, the bottom surface of the front and back hangers are coplanar. In the photo above of the back hanger, I measured each boss to be 7/16" (0.4375") and 1 11/16" (1.6875") from the bottom edge of the hanger.

Did you know you can type fractional dimensions into xDesign and it will convert it to decimals?  Like shown above, just type 11/16 (without any units such as in or mm) for the sketch dimension and hit enter and it will automatically converted to 0.6875".

Next, I created another Sketch Pattern and spaced the back holes with the same 5.75" dimension. I switch apps over to xDrawing and dimensioned 2 views marking the dimensions from the bottom edge of the rail to each of the hole positions.

I then printed the drawing to have reference to in my shop. I used the drawing and measured the distances for the 4 front rail holes and then drilled pilot holes for each.

For the back holes, I cut a guide template out of the same 3/4" poplar used to create the rails. The length would match that of the rails and the width would be based on distance from the back hanger holes to the inside side of the cabinet.

Then I used the tape measure and marked a line at each of the distances for the back holes along the guide template. This will make locating and drilling the holes in the back of the cabinet very easy to do.

Here I positioned the guide to the right vertical interior edge of the cabinet.  The width of the guide matches the distance between the holes and the right edge of the cabinet and the lines drawn on the side of the guide mark where the holes go.

I used a small bit to drill a pilot hole at each of the marks.  Then used a 3/8" bit to drill the full size holes. Then I used a counter sink bit to chamfer the inside edge of each hole to help align the plastic dowels on each hanger.

Hear all of the holes are complete and the bottom 2 glides installed. Before I assembled all of the drawers I installed some 3 1/2" Cabinet Screws to securely attached the cabinet into the wall studs.

Finally, all of the drawers are installed into each cabinet!

For most projects, this part of the job would be complete after installing the drawers, but my cabinets are 30" deep and the drawers are only 24" deep. This leaves a 6" space in front of the drawers where you can see the middle shelf does not extend completely to the front of the cabinet.  This is because the shelf would cover 6 inches of usable space when the top drawer is in its open most position which I did not like for functional reasons.

Also, the front edge of the middle shelf and the routed dado the shelf sits in needs to be finished off with some solid wood trim. But instead of using more poplar, I thought it would be nice to have a color break and decided to use some left over 3/4"  walnut that would look nice.

I had this idea to make a curved shelf divider out of walnut that would be a nice accent to each of the cabinets.

I started by cutting two rectangular pieces of walnut on my table saw that will slide into the void in front of the middle shelf. First by ripping the width of each piece.

Then cross cutting both to exact length also on the table saw.

Here is one of the walnut dividers dry fit into place to check fit.

Then I used my biscuit cutter to cut slots both in the middle shelf and the walnut dividers to strengthen the glue joint along this edge.

I waned a curved cutout in the walnut panel so that it would not cover too much of the top drawer as discussed above, so I turned to Adobe Illustrator and first drew a rectangle at the same size as the walnut divider. Then I drew a spline from one corner of the rectangle in towards the middle at approx. 2 inches from the longer glue edge of the piece. I only have a small letter size printer at home so I made sure I could print the template out of 3 pieces of paper and then tape them together.

Here you can see the paper template sitting on top of the 2 walnut dividers, shown with the slots for biscuits. I traced a pencil line onto the walnut boards to use for cutting on the band saw. Note, it was easier to cut the biscuit slots before cutting the curve.

Then, I cut both walnut boards on my band saw.

Smoothed out the curved cut on a reciprocating drum sander.

Then rounded over the top and bottom edge for the curved cut on the router table using a 1/4" round bit.

Finally, here is one of the curved walnut dividers glued into place, then added a few brads and filled the nail holes with the brown wood filler.

Last weekend I installed the cork flooring too!

Next steps:

• ​​​​​​​Design the outer cabinet trim
• Cut and install outer cabinet trim