Install Drawers Like a Pro

When you're ready to put drawers into a cabinet, there are a lot of places for this to go south. And if those errors accumulate, then the drawers are gonna look really weird when you're done. So we've got to get the slides in the case just right. We've got to get the slides on the drawer box. Just right. We've got to get the fronts on the drawers just right. So Craig has got a bunch of problem solvers here that are gonna make this a lot easier. So we don't get cumulative errors. So full extension slides, gonna store these down here for now. What we need to do to get going is get slides in the cabinet. That's step one. So I've got a mark on here that shows me where I want the slide to go and I just wanna extend that mark into the cabinet. So from here, we're gonna go to there. Now, the challenge we're up against normally is that's where I want to slide. So to try to hold it, position it drive screws into it, we're missing like 18 arms here. What's gonna simplify? This is to use the drawer installation jig, the slide installation jig which is gonna register against the front of the face frame there. And then I align it with that pencil mark I just made and it provides a ledge so that I don't need 100 different arms. I only need two, gonna open that up and that'll rest there on its own. So now it's simple. All I need to do is keep the front of the slide aligned with the front of the cabinet out here, have a peek inside where my screw holes are. I'm gonna repeat this process on the other side using the other mirror image component of the jig here. So that's gonna go just like that. I'm gonna get the other slide in here and then we can use this same jig in order to get the drawer box in there just right. I'll show you that in the next step. Now all the slides are in the cabinet. Next thing we gotta do is get the draw in here. So there are a couple of things I want to point out whether your face frame style or Euros style, these jigs are gonna handle the door slides for you. One of the things that's great about them is there are these registration points. Um So for instance, there's a tab right here that you're gonna see me use in a second in order to register it vertically on my face frame, there's a shoulder here. So when I was inserting this into the cabinet for the slide to rest on that shoulder is the stop against the face frame that then also holds this perpendicular inside the cabinet. So this one, this stop is gonna come into play now because we're gonna do this in order to get this set up just like that one. And now what we have are basically ledges that the door box can sit on. So we need the other slide component in place and then this becomes easy. Peasy door box just rests on there. Pull that out. So stupid simple. Because what that's doing is it's holding the drawer in exactly the right spot in the cabinet while I screw these up, I'll get all the screws on this side, do the same thing to the other side. And then the next thing we can do his look at what do we need to do in or in order to get the draw front sign. Now with the door boxes in, we're just missing drawer fronts like that. And the challenge here is we need this to be not necessarily level, we need to be oriented correctly on the cabinet and we need to be centered left and right again, a lot of stuff going on, a lot of chance to accumulate error. So in this case, I'm using a Craig jig again to put the drawer fronts on. So the way this will work, there's a right and a left and that's gonna clamp onto the drawer box. And what I like about this is that we're in a real world scenario here, meaning I'm using the jig with the drawer in the cabinet and the drawer front about to go on the cabinet. So there's no speculation here. It's, um, it's going together the exact way that the cabinet is gonna go together. Don't need to pay too much attention to overall configuration yet because we're gonna be able to do that in a second. So when the jig is on the drawer, what it lets me do is grab the drawer box and grab the drawer front. And of course, now with the scales here, I can use those scales and get the same measurement on the right that I have on the left, that'll get me centered and, or a line with a set of drawers that's below whatever, um, set up you're looking for, for your project. What I'm gonna do now is to shot made spacers on top of the doors. So this is where it gets really easy. All I need to do is this, let it sit on those spacers. And then what I'm doing is I'm looking at a lining the edge of my drawer front with the edge of my doors, lock that in place. And then maybe the coolest part is kind of like, what do I do next? And what we do next is you can open this and then drive screws from the inside to hold that in place. Then in our world of rinse and repeat, we're done with the jig here, but the rinse and repeat part will be next drawer and that's where this stuff is going to come in. Ok. Same starting point. Just get the drawer front on there. Not too much concern yet about where it is here. These guys are shims. So with these shims, we can use those to establish our spacing here. And a neat aspect of that is that they're magnetic. So if I want to build them up into a stack, I can in order to use the whole stack or part of a stack. So now I'm feeling my door front edges to get those aligned, clamp the door front in place, make sure I'm seated against the door box and a double check and insane drive screws from the inside. And we're set consistent spacing even on the edges consistently centered in line with the doors below. So for drawer installation, Craig's really got this nailed down to make this simpler more accurate. And you don't need to have eight octopus arms in order to put your drawers in.