What furniture is and how its kinds are built is in furniture making. This guide is the sequence: the order in which a cabinet — a plywood or solid case with doors, drawers or shelves — is made, and the reason for each step's place in it.
Before any wood is cut
Planning a cabinet
Measure the space
Measure where the piece will go: width, height, depth, and anything in the way — skirting, sockets, a sloping floor. Furniture built to the drawing alone may not fit the room.
Choose the hardware first
Hinges and slides set the sizes of doors and drawers. A hinge's overlay comes from its maker — one Blum frameless kit, for example, gives 14 to 18 mm depending on where the cup is bored — and a slide's side space likewise; Accuride's guide for its 3832 slide gives ½ in. Choose them before drawing the openings.
Draw it
Draw the piece to scale with every part, its joints and its material, and mark which faces show.
Make a cut list
List every part with its finished size and material, then the stock to buy. The cut list optimizer lays parts out on boards and sheets, and the board foot calculator prices the solid stock.
Making the case
From stock to a glued case
Let the stock settle, then mill it
Wood gains or loses moisture until it matches the shop's air, and changes size as it does, as the Wood Handbook explains. Bring it in, then mill it flat, straight and square.
Measure the real material
Measure the plywood's actual thickness before cutting any dado or rabbet sized to it; it is rarely the nominal figure, as the plywood thickness chart shows.
Cut the case joinery
Cut the dadoes, rabbets or other joints the drawing calls for, testing each setup on scrap of the same material. Choosing a wood joint explains which joint suits which job.
Dry-fit
Assemble the whole case without glue, with clamps, to prove every joint closes and every part is the right size. Fix problems now; glue allows no second try.
Glue up and check square
Glue and clamp, then measure the two diagonals of the case. When they are equal the case is square; if not, adjust the clamps until they are, before the glue sets.
Then doors, drawers and shelves
Only now are the doors and drawers sized — from the openings of the case as built, because no glue-up is exactly the drawing. Measure each opening, then use the cabinet door size calculator with your hinge's overlay or the reveal you want, and the drawer size calculator with your slides' clearances. For shelves on pins, the shelf span calculator estimates how much a shelf of a given span and thickness will sag — an estimate, not a safe load. Fit the hardware to its maker's instructions, then finish.
| Mistake | What happens | The step that prevents it |
|---|---|---|
| Doors cut from the drawing | They do not fit the case as built | Measure the real openings first |
| Dadoes cut to nominal plywood | Loose or tight joints | Measure the material |
| Glue-up without a dry fit | A joint that will not close, discovered too late | Dry-fit |
| Case glued out of square | Doors and drawers that never fit | Check the diagonals while clamped |
| Hardware chosen last | Openings the wrong size for the hinges or slides | Choose hardware first |
Established bench practice, in BenchRoot's own words.
Safety— Tall cases and heavy doors
Anchor tall cases to the wall against tipping, as the CPSC's Anchor It campaign urges, and fix wall cabinets with fixings chosen from their makers' data. The general rules are in woodworking safety rules.
Practice the order on a simple case first: the bookshelf plans build one with dadoed fixed shelves, and the cabinet plans add sliding doors. Advanced woodworking projects shows where to go next.
Before the glue-up
- Hinges and slides chosen, and openings drawn for them
- Material thickness measured and joints cut to it
- A full dry fit, with clamps ready
- A tape measure for the diagonals
- Doors and drawers not yet cut
Sources
The order of work is established bench practice in BenchRoot's own words; the square check by equal diagonals is geometry. Hardware figures are examples from one hinge and one slide maker, showing why doors and drawers wait for the hardware; they are not defaults. Wood moving with moisture is from the Wood Handbook.
- 1.
Chapter 4: Moisture Relations and Physical Properties of Wood. USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory — Wood Handbook, FPL-GTR-282, 2021.
Used for: Wood gaining or losing moisture until it matches the air around it, and changing size as it does — why stock is brought to the shop before it is milled to final size.
- 2.
Kit Instructions H002: CLIP top BLUMOTION 110° (soft close) hinge. Blum, Inc., 2025.
Used for: Hinge overlay set by the hinge and its cup and plate positions (14 to 18 mm on this frameless kit), which is why doors are sized once the hinge is chosen.
- 3.
How to Install a 3832 Drawer Slide on a Frameless Cabinet in a Few Steps. Accuride International.
Used for: A slide's side space set by its maker — ½ in on this slide's guide — which is why drawer boxes are sized once the slides are chosen.
- 4.
AnchorIt.gov. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Used for: Tall cases anchored to the wall against tipping.
About this guide
Written by BenchRoot Editorial. How BenchRoot sources, checks and corrects its pages is set out in the Editorial Policy. If something here is wrong or unclear, the contact page explains how to tell us.