Kitchen cabinet design

[Paul K. Murphy]

Make sure you can get it through the door.
Once, once only, I very nearly built a "basement boat."
Be sure you can lift it too. Simple stuff like that.

[Leinie]

I build everything as big as can be in one piece. Limiting factors are getting it into the house, and weight. One of the last houses I did had an upper 10' long. Two of us handled it easily with a couple props. 8' long base cabinets are not uncommon either.

[Stwood_]

6' will save a dab of material over 3 2'ers.

That's what I did when I was in the business. If I needed an 8', that's what I built.

Your 6' will be fairly easy to hang if you leave the doors off.
I have self made cabinet jacks. I would/could hang that 6' by myself.

[MT Stringer]

I have built cabinets for two complete kitchens. They are multiple cabinets and they all went together with no problem. Clamp the stiles together and install screws. Shims are your friend!

The plus of multiple cabinet boxes is the shelves can be adjusted to fit the contents.

The widest box we hung was 42 inches wide x 39 inches tall. It went OK. Me and the missus did it with a 2x4 screwed to the wall and a couple of jacks to support the cabinet(s) until we could level, attach them.

Good luck.
Mike

Here are some pics of our kitchen. My sweetie loves it. I think I have gained about 15 pounds. She is in there cooking all of the time.
http://s226.photobucket.com/user/mt_stri...rt=2&page=1

[John Mihich]

While it will heavy it's doable - I know because I did this at my old house. After I made the cabinet I put a cleat on the wall just under the bottom of the cabinet. I also cut a couple of boards to hold the cabinet - placed at the front. Worked well.

[Cooler]

I think it is much easier to produce the smaller boxes. I would consider a unified face frame. That would improve the looks in my opinion. But it will require more thought in the layout.

It will eliminate face frame to face frame joints. You will have to use biscuits to hide the fasteners as pocket screws will show. It sounds like more work to me. I would stick with smaller boxes.

On the same subject, on my very first base cabinet with a face frame I used biscuits to attache the face frame. Shortly after that I got a pocket hole jig and used that to both construct the face frame and to join it to the cabinet.

But commercial base cabinets seem to favor milling a groove in the vertical face frames and gluing the side panels into the grooves. Is that a viable option for those of us who build our own cabinets?

[Cian]

I had a local pro shop build my custom kitchen cabinets. The longest run of uppers is 8'-6" long and was built as one piece. The horizontal runs of the face frame are made from individual pieces of lumber for the whole length and it looks wonderful.

I liked the look so much, I made my shop cabinets recently based on the same principle:

[Cooler]

Cian said:

---

I had a local pro shop build my custom kitchen cabinets. The longest run of uppers is 8'-6" long and was built as one piece. The horizontal runs of the face frame are made from individual pieces of lumber for the whole length and it looks wonderful.

I liked the look so much, I made my shop cabinets recently based on the same principle:

---

The cabinets are not one piece; only the face frame. And I agree the one piece face frame looks better, but requires more careful planning when building.

[joe1086]

LIL

I'm an amateur and did my cabinets a few years back. Longest one was a bit over 5' long.

One suggestion is to incorporate french cleats into the cabinet design. That's what I did and it made the process of hanging the cabinets super easy for a one man operation.

Good luck.

[Phil Thien]

To those indicating it will be too heavy to lift/hang, I thought individual cabinets were screwed together and lifted/hung as a single unit anyhow, wouldn't this longer unit with less materials actually weigh less?