Review #7 - Kick-plate Drawers

The kickplate drawers are great - now that they are in. I will rate these a 3 - I like the resutlts, but I could have done these differently.



I made the bases out of 2x4s, and screwed the drawer slides to the sides. Once these bases were in place, I screwed the cabinets to them.



So what didn't work so well? The 2x4's ended up having either a slight twist or warp to them. When I attached the drawer slides to them, they were a obviously off as well and needed to be adjusted. There is not a lot of room under there to do the adjusting, so it was a bit frustrating. I ended up shimming them to get them aligned well enough for smooth operation. Lucky I didn't build the drawers until after I did this, or they would have been slightly too wide.

What would I have done diffferent? I would have glued and screwed 2 pieces of 3/4 plywood together instead of 2x4's. This would have made a much straighter, stable frame for the slides - no shimming required.

One final positive note, making these drawers extra wide (34 inches) was a good idea. My DW can easily large flat stuff.

Cabinet Install & Kick-plate Drawers

We installed most of the cabinets today, getting about 80% complete. I plan on finshing them off in the morning and getting the base of the counter top in. The soffits lined up pretty much exactly as planned.

Notice under the some of the cabinets there are open spaces - these are for the kick plate drawers.


Here are the base assemblies, made of 2x4. We mounted full extension drawer slides to the interiors.

We want to make these drawers as wide as possible. Where the drawer is wider than a single cabinet, I supported the them with a piece of steel channel underneith. These are glued with polyurathane and screwed in place.