I think if you want minimal gaps you will need a separate drawer head?

It sounds like he wants the front of the drawer box to be the finished front of the drawer?

I have no idea why people still insist on inset designed cabinets . Frameless just is so much better, you can have the look but the storage is just better. I know hubby is a cabinet maker and has his own ideas about what is the right way but I will tell you Ikea has the perfect way to build and install cabinets . My Dad was a cabinet maker very high end and even had to admit Ikea cabinets were constructed really well. I store glassware in drawers no problem I collect china and glassware so I also built an Ikea cube with frosted glass doors thet holds my 8 / 12 place settings of china, a coat closet a pullout for food a wine cfridge and all in a wasted space in my entry next to the kirtchen As for the space you are asking about 1/8" is ideal and no one wants to see the dovetail joints no matter how proud of them he is,

It's wonderful that your husband has the skills and time to build your own cabinets. We too have custom inset cabinets. The look is classic and refined. I'm not sure what you mean by gap thought. I'm sorry though that I don't understand enough about construction to comment. Is the gap an interior gap or are they talking about on the front face of the drawers when they are closed against the cabinet? We have dovetail joinery and when our drawers are closed I can hardly see any gap at all.

Frameless cabinets don't look like inset cabinets. If anything, they look like full overlay cabinets. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want the look of inset, you need inset. And usually a traditional house calls for inset, though there are alternatives. I really like the retro/traditional style drawers in the below kitchen, which to me look like they are partial overlay (though the cabinet doors are still inset).

I do not think having gaps that size is acceptable. It's much larger than typical on inset cabinetry.

What @palimpsest said. They may be referring to the drawer box and not the drawer head (if that's what it's called). You can check various cabinet manufacturers' websites to see what their tolerances are. I think most are around 3/32.

This is an interesting chat.

https://www.woodweb.com/knowledge_base/Inset_Cabinet_Door_Fitting_and_Tolerances.html

Ok, I went into my kitchen. we have undermounted blum drawer sliders. When the drawer is open you see the beautiful dove tail and not the slider. The gap seems 1/8” or small. (My eye sight stinks so Im terrible are reading a ruler!) Note, for our lager bank of inset drawers we chose to look at a set of three as one unit and inset around them as a wholle but not between each drawer. We have a small kitchen and needed to save space somewhere!

Kendrah, if you took off the drawer front you would have the gap that the OP is referring to. You need to measure from the drawer side to the frame (not the drawer front to the frame) to come up with an equivalent gap.

Aimee, is your husband building the drawers with half blind dovetails (like Kendrah's) or through dovetails? If half blind, then when the drawer is closed the joinery wouldn't be visible anyway, so no reason not to put on a separate drawer front. The gap is necessary for the Blum slides, and is more than what is typical for inset cabinetry.

You can't have the look of inset with frameless unless you play a lot of tricks with fillers in between boxes, which wastes more than the space you gain from using a frameless box instead of a framed box to begin with. Not every kitchen in the western world looks right with frameless cabinets.

These just don't look the same, and sometimes the difference between the two could be important design-wise:

Thank you everyone, sorry its taking me so long to get back, I wasn’t getting notifications. @Kendrah Im going to show your photos to him, this is exactly what I want. Thanks again.

Agreed with others--the gap is standard for Blum slides (and I love ours!) but it will look strange if you don't use a drawer front with it. Not totally clear on why he wants the dovetailed joints visible, but if that's non-negotiable, then I'd look at other cabinet styles. A 3/16" exposed gap will look odd with inset. Even with a front, you'll still get to see the joints when you open the drawers, if that's the concern.

@artemis78 It isnt non negotiable, I showed him Kendrah’s photos and hes already agreed to do it that way. He was just going off what Blums website said and didnt think about it being too big of a gap until I mentioned it, he assumed that was standard. Thanks for your input!

Housewarming party sign with arrow: <----CHECK OUT THE AMAZING JOINERY!

If my husband made amazing joinery, I'd probably show everyone who walked in the door of our house for the next decade.

@Aimee I clearly don't know much about carpentry, but if he wants me to take any other pics from different angles, I'm glad to. Or, picks of other drawers. Happy to support anyone who is keeping the inset style alive!

@Kendrah thank you so much for the support! I’m really excited to have the new cabinets, we are a single income family who have been living in a tiny 1970 cape for the last 12 years with a falling apart 1970 kitchen and I feel blessed that my husband is willing and capable to do this for us at this point. We want to do our best. I may come back and tag you for more pics and advice at some point! He has built cabinets in his workshop and they look great but its his first time with inset, we are learning.

I thought I had a photo of ours with no fronts on the drawers, but could only find this one--you can still see a bit of the clearance in the back, though. To meet the required clearances for the Blum undermount slides, the drawer box has to be a bit smaller, but the front hides this. (Ignore the too-short drawer fronts; those were originally supposed to have cutting boards but there was some miscommunication on the design and we gave up on that plan!)

This was our cabinetmaker's second time building inset cabinets, though he'd been doing frameless for some time. The alignment and tolerances around the door/drawer fronts seemed to be the trickiest piece--frameless is a bit more forgiving. He took some doors and drawer fronts on and off several times adjusting them before he was happy with the results. (I think they turned out beautifully in the end, but there is definitely some variance in the tolerance around doors/drawers if you look closely.) I believe a 1/8" gap for the doors/drawer fronts is industry standard but he wanted these closer to 1/16" for aesthetics, which gets tricky.

@Aimee Well congrats on an update from the 70's. On some subjects there is a ton of expertise on Houzz. On others, I find it can be helpful to go to less glamorous sites that are really a bunch of nerdy carpenters, plumbers, and construction dudes who share shop talk and will walk your husband through the way more technical details. The sites usually pop up if I put a really technical quesiton into a google search. I can't vouch for this one but it is what popped up when I entered info about gaps around inset drawer:

https://www.woodworkingtalk.com

@Aimee - 3/16” seems a little big to me, but you don’t really want that anyway and there is a better way to do it. But it is a bit difficult to explain, so feel free to ask follow up questions.

Blum provides drawer opening requirements based on faced drawer installation. If you don’t want faced drawers, you need to build a wider opening inside of the cabinets for your drawer glides to attach to. You really don’t have to build an opening since Blum glides attach to the sides of your cabinet, you just need a couple of wood strips that are not as proud as your face frames to attach them to. You might have to cut a small relief into the back side of the face frame if it is too deep but you shouldn’t need to. I hope this helps, I will try to sketch something on sketchup a bit later (dinner and family time now!).

@bry911 thank you. (he is doing his plans on sketchup!) If you have the time, we can take a look at them and then decide between the two options. thanks again.

Popping in to say while I have no input on anything useful, I 100% agree with Kendrah -- "If my husband made amazing joinery, I'd probably show everyone who walked in the door of our house for the next decade." That's really cool that your husband can do this!!

@Aimee - Here you go.

1. The full cabinet assembly.

2. The view from inside the cabinet. The wood added (shown below in purple) will be on both sides and the distance between them is what you will use for the specified opening dimensions. This allows you to reduce the opening of the face frame (shown below in green) below minimum specified dimensions, because the glides are actually attached to the board (purple). You can also shift the glide up and down until you are comfortable with the opening at the bottom.

3. The front of the drawer bottom will probably need a cheater board (shown below in green). Rather than "mathing" it out, I would install the drawer without it and measure how proud the drawer is of the face frame and build a cheater board that size.

Good luck and I hope this helps.

---

ETA: The first glide set may take a little trial and error to get a result that you are satisfied with. After that they will all be the same. The drawer bottom will likely be the more difficult piece and may take a few attempts.

The love that this community has for frameless is baffling to me. There is no significant advantage to frameless cabinets and there are some disadvantages to them. If you like the frameless look then great, they are great cabinets, but the storage/access thing is largely just a misunderstanding.

The most common size for cabinet boxes for frameless cabinets is 3/4" and so two cabinets beside each other will have a combined box width of 1.5". Which happens to be the second most common size of frame width in inset cabinets. So if you are doing custom inset cabinets, you can literally do it so you lose ZERO drawer width, and with a hybrid, or framed box, inset you lose no drawer height. Even with frames between the drawers, you are losing the top 1.5" of cabinet... Do you all really stack stuff that high in drawers? There is no difference in drawer depth, they both use the same glides just in different positions.

The most common width of the face frames is 2". So choosing that over the 1.5" means each drawer will lose 1/4" on each side for a total loss of drawer width of 1/2" on each cabinet. However, inset cabinets don't need spacers. You can do an inset drawer right next to a wall or put drawers in a corner without a spacer. Also since your cabinets have one even front you don't have to do the battle with the molding on lining up with the boxes or lining up with the doors.

Again, if you like frameless then get that. However, if you like inset then there really is no reason for most people to get frameless for the extra space.

To be fair, we have a mix of framed inset and frameless, and I really do believe each has its place. We used inset on one side of our kitchen because we wanted to match the aesthetic of our home's existing inset built-ins for our upper and tall cabinets and we had a wacky angle to deal with (see photo below!) and really didn't like the look of angled frameless cabinets there. It was 100% the right choice for that wall. But the other section of our kitchen is a very tight L where we need every inch, and because it is punctuated with appliances and a sink, we would have lost a great deal of space with inset because the cabinets aren't next to one another. We went function over form for that area and don't regret that at all either--it maximized the cabinet space for a small kitchen and allowed us to do some things (like a corner pullout) that wouldn't have fit in framed cabinetry (which I know because we started with a plan for all inset and changed it out!) While it isn't conventional, it works for our house and means we have the right cabinetry in the right spaces. I don't like one better than the other--they're both great for their own reasons.

@Aimee - I apologize for hijacking your thread for the frameless vs. inset discussion, but I had SketchUp open and this is a point I have tried to make several times, that I fear I am not making very well without visuals.

FRAMELESS VS. FRAMED INSET:

1. Frameless cabinet frames... This example has a wall to the left and is open to the right and so it includes a 1.5" spacer on the left and has a skinned right side.

2. Let's add some simple doors to the frames.

3. Framed inset. In framed inset the box is framed but there are no frames between drawer boxes. This is the same set of cabinets only the left cabinet has been increased 1.5" because you no longer need the spacer.

4. Framed inset frame over the original frameless cabinet boxes. Notice the additional 3/4" you gain on the left side against the wall.

5. From the back. Using 1.5" face frames you will see that the only space you lose is 3/4" at the top of every cabinet. You don't lose any width at all in any cabinet.

Now. 1.5" is the second most common frame width. If you use 2" frame width (the most common), you could lose about a 1/4" per cabinet in width. So in this example, you could lose 1/4" overall counting what you gained on the left and lost in each cabinet.

However... in reality you often lose nothing at all, because drawers are rarely built with tight tolerances. For example, you can get a 2" face frame around IKEA cabinets and use the exact same drawers. There is almost a half inch of play around IKEA drawers before you start hitting the glide mechanism and that is pretty common.

If you don't like framed inset another great look is a partially framed inset. With these, there is a rail between the top drawer and bottom 2 drawers but there is no rail between the bottom drawers. This creates a really cool look if you are doing a combination of doors and drawers as the rail will flow through your entire kitchen.

---

I actually prefer the look of frameless, but I can assure you... if you are doing custom cabinets with someone who actually knows what they are doing. The reduction of space is mostly a non-issue.

Having said the above, inset can struggle with production cabinetmakers. The entire point of inset is one piece of wood between two cabinets or drawers, if a production shop just frames each box individually and puts a 30" long seem between two cabinets it loses a lot of the value.

@bry911 Thank you, I’m learning a lot!

@bry911, I think your point holds true if there are no frames around the drawers, as in your diagram. But flush inset cabinetry traditionally has frames around each drawer, so you do lose quite a bit of space in drawer banks both vertically and horizontally. (You don't lose much, if any, in well-designed door cabinets.)

In our kitchen, for instance, our inset cabinetry has 1.5" frames that run on all sides and in between the drawers. Our frameless cabinetry, which was built by the same cabinetmaker so literally has identical drawer boxes, cabinet sides, etc., only has 3/4" between each drawer and on the sides. So 30" of cabinet height with three drawers = 24" of usable drawer height in our inset drawer bank and 27" of usable height in our frameless bank. Similarly, the inset bank loses a full 3" to the frames on the sides, while the frameless bank loses only 1.5". If you have a number of freestanding cabinets, that adds up.

In a kitchen with runs of side-by-side cabinets where you aren't using frames between the drawers or where the cabinets are mostly doors, I agree that there is no real difference in capacity. But assuming you have traditional face frame cabinetry with full frames around each drawer, you are definitely trading space for aesthetics. In our particular kitchen, we really didn't have space to offer--we tried multiple layouts using inset for all of the cabinetry but in the end, we were a couple of inches shy of having enough space for the configuration we wanted without having to trade something else significant off. I still love the look of inset and am really glad we used them where we had the room to, but I am also very glad we didn't downsize our sink or give up our corner storage just to make the inset work in that part of our kitchen.

@artemis78 - I really don't know what to tell you. Your inset cabinets were not designed with an efficient use of space in mind. Which is fine, there is nothing wrong with a cabinet that satisfies some aesthetic appeal. However, that is not a problem with all inset cabinets, it is just a reflection of the style and priorities you chose for those cabinets.

If your 30" drawer bank loses 3" of width for inset doors then that means that you are using 3" frame width. Which can look really great but it is pretty big. That is not a problem with inset cabinets, it is a problem with using 3" frames. Furthermore, there is no reason to lose 3" of drawer width even with 3" frame width, because inset cabinets require less glide clearance. So realistically, even with 3" frame width you should lose no more than 1" of useable drawer width, which is again offset by no spacers.

As for the height... First, let's realize there are many more modern versions of inset cabinets which frame the box rather than every door and drawer, so that constraint isn't applicable to the OP or likely to anyone doing full custom cabinets. However, if you really like the look of a traditional frameless cabinet, you are not really losing 3" of useful space. Most people use a pretty small percentage of the top 1.5" of a drawer opening. Open up your frameless drawers and see how much stuff is less than 1.5" from the door above. That is the percentage you are considering sacrificing for a framed cabinet.

Again, if that is too much for you, then find one of the many variations of hybrid inset cabinets that meet your needs and have the style you want.

Here is one of my favorite styles of inset (mentioned above) with the top drawer framed but the lower drawers unframed. There is almost no loss of useful space in this design as few people will have so much stuff in the top 1.5" of drawer height that they can't add one rail.

With all due respect, I think you're not understanding how traditional flush inset cabinets are framed. Our frames are 1.5", not 3"--but they lose that 3" of space because you have a 1.5" frame, then a drawer, then another 1.5" frame, then a second drawer, then another 1.5" frame, then a third drawer, and then the bottom 1.5" frame. It looks like this:

They are matched to the original cabinets in the house, which is why we chose 1.5" frames, but it's also a fairly common size for flush inset cabinetry.

The frameless cabinets have 3/4" walls where the framed cabinet has 1.5" frames, so for an equivalent three-drawer cabinet, you lose 3" of vertical drawer height to the frames (3/4" x 4) and 1.5" in width (3/4" x 2). Our cabinets all use the same Blum full-extension undermount slides so the slide clearance is the same for both. So measuring this in real life, the three-drawer inset cabinet has usable drawer openings of 6" + 9" + 9" (24" total) and the frameless has 5.5" + 10.5" + 11" (27" total). Hard to get a good photo of the frameless cabinet boxes with the drawers in, but looks like this:

We sized all of our drawers to the heights we needed for the contents since our cabinets are custom, so we use all the vertical height--YMMV if you don't use the top couple of inches of storage space in your drawers. Again, if you do modern inset cabinetry with no face frames between the drawers, then you're all set and don't lose space--but then you don't have traditional flush inset cabinetry, so it's an entirely different conversation. Are there ways to blend frameless and face frame styles to get the general look of flush inset drawers without sacrificing space? Absolutely. But are there ways to do fully framed inset drawers without losing any space? Not so much--it's a tradeoff.

Face framed inset cabinets are what a woodowrker would consider quality and the reason is the are the most diffuclcult to make properly.

You are not noticing the difference in interior space unless you have a 3 cabinet kitchen. Stop the BS as Euro are 3/4 and face frame are 1.5 as noted above.

Your gaps have zero to do with your slides as your drawers can function with zero front installed.

Anyone who thinks Ikea or Euro cabs are equal in qulaity or cosntruction to face frame cabs hasnt a clue about cabinets. Euro 32mm cabs were developed to make low cost flat boxed cabinet cases NOTHING about quality.

Fcae farme cabinets actually use the same carcass as a Euro cabinet and add a face frace frame to it. The frame adds strength to the box and is the same reason quality furniture is built the same way. they take almost double teh time to construct.

Inset style drawers and droors are the sign of craftsmanship as it is not easy to get perfect gaps but once achieved you have a pice that will last many life times.

I have done many kitchens building and using Ikea. Ikea works but NO they are not anywhere near the quality of a plywood box faceframe cabinet. It is a shame that people see these lower cost goods and now actryally consider them better quality than actual quality goods. Kind of like comlianing that real wood looks like real wood vs fake plastic floors. Welcome to 2023!

@artemis78 said, "With all due respect, I think you're not understanding how traditional flush inset cabinets are framed. Our frames are 1.5", not 3"--but they lose that 3" of space because you have a 1.5" frame, then a drawer, then another 1.5" frame, then a second drawer, then another 1.5" frame, then a third drawer, and then the bottom 1.5" frame."

With all due respect, just because you chose "traditional" flush inset cabinets, why does that mean anyone else has to? I know exactly how traditional flush inset cabinets are framed, I also know that hybrid flush inset cabinets are becoming a lot more popular. So why can't someone have inset cabinets without having to conform to your idea of them? The answer, is that the OP can absolutely choose to an inset cabinet and construct them in a way that meets their needs. Just to be clear, I have built enough inset cabinets to have a pretty decent understanding.

"if you do modern inset cabinetry with no face frames between the drawers, then you're all set and don't lose space--but then you don't have traditional flush inset cabinetry, so it's an entirely different conversation."

You might as well argue that if you don't have site constructed cabinets then you don't have traditional flush inset cabinetry. This is just garden variety gatekeeping.

For the record, I would argue that any variety of inset cabinets that installs the frame in one piece after the boxes or at least tries to hide the beefed up stiles is closer to traditional inset cabinetry than any production made inset cabinet that gets delivered fully assembled and two separate 1.5" stiles are ganged together to try to fool people into believing they are traditional inset.

Production inset, this is not the way inset were traditionally done and so I don't know that I would call this a traditional anything as it was not the tradition.

What the rails and stiles should look like in a traditional inset.

Notice how all the rails and stiles are the same size and the stiles between the cabinets are not beefed up because they are easier to produce that way.

When did anyone say that people have to use traditional inset cabinets? (I mean, I'm literally a case in point--we chose frameless!) The point is just that if you do, it will cost you space for drawers. I think we will just have to agree to disagree on whether or not hybrid inset cabinets look the same as traditional flush inset. To me, they are not the same, though I think they are an excellent solution if you want an inset look but don't want to sacrifice the space. But the entire reason they exist as a concept is because you *do* lose space with traditional inset drawers. My idea of traditional flush inset isn't something I came up with on my own, nor is it particularly unusual--it was a pretty ubiquitous style of cabinetry for houses of the same era as mine in my area, and in many other parts of the country.

(And yes, I agree entirely wrt production inset cabinets--those make me nuts to look at in photos, though I also know people who have and like them since they are often more affordable, so to each his own. I know that we were very lucky to find our cabinetmaker when we did; because he was new to building inset, he priced his work accordingly. Even a year or two later when I passed his name on to other GWers, his rates had gone up, and today they are well beyond our budget.)

Some of us build full inset doors and drawers into a frameless cabinet when it suits us.

For kitchen cabinets it's an OK expedient to attach an oversize drawer front as a separate piece to the drawer, but a more elegant solution is to make the larger drawer front integral with the drawer, using half-blind dovetails to attach the sides to the front. For the space obsessed this buys you 1/2 to 3/4" more space the width of the drawer. Mostly though it looks like furniture rather than an assemblage of parts. And, of course, the dovetails should never look like cheap machine made joints.

Any mechanical drawer glide is probably going to cost you some space, albeit providing the convenience of things like full extension. In good furniure work the drawers are sized precisely to their openings with gaps of well under 1/16"-- the goal is a "piston fit", where there is resistance to closing the door from the air pressure trapped within. You tune the drawer to the opening using a hand plane to remove a couple thousandths of an inch at a time until the fit is perfect-- tight enough for pleasing resistance, not so tight it won't close. Only crazy obsessed people with a lot of time on their hands do this for their kitchen cabinets. It's very satisfying when you get it right.

Most important for inset work is that the gaps be uniform on all sides. Anything much bigger than 1/16" is going to look like a mistake to a woodworker; commercial cabinets and furniture almost always have bigger gaps than that.

Rather than go back and forth about what is acceptable versus not, what is traditional versus a convenient modification... Let me just say this.

There are very few people who should pick frameless for the extra space. Because there are very few people whose kitchens are organized and optimized well enough that the deciding factor should be a few inches of drawer space. If those few inches are that precious, then you should probably be sacrificing convenience also and getting pull outs rather than drawers. Sure... you may have wanted drawers in your kitchen, but it is going to hold more stuff… so you have to do pullouts.

Frameless are great... I just finished some, but they are not even close to the best solution for every kitchen.

please post pics of the cabinets…they are going to be beautiful. we just ordered custom inset and i’m so excited! good luck to you and your husband during the process!

@rwiegand Thank you for understanding why he was hoping no false front although he did change his mind. It sounds like you know a lot about wood so I have a question for you. Our house is not climate controlled, we heat with a wood stove in winter (warm but dry air) and have one little window unit AC in the summer that we only turn on sometimes so it gets pretty humid. Should he worry about allowing for the wood to expand or contract? He will probably start building the drawers and doors later this spring temps will probably be in the 60s on average. Or will 1/16” to just under 1/8” be enough to allow for that. Sorry if this is a silly question.

I don't think most people's kitchens are that well-organized that losses of 3/4" of inches inside a cabinet are going to make a big difference.

The drawer heads were inches wider and taller on the cheap frameless cabinets I just took out of my kitchen. The drawer box was 3" high, the drawer head was 6" and there was a difference in the widths, too. Not all frameless is created equal.

I also don't buy the time and motion efficiency of motion argument for drawers vs. doors and pullouts. If time-saving were that crucial, people probably would not have time to be on forums like this proselytizing about all-drawer bases. I'm here a lot, I don't think I would be here more if I had all drawers in my kitchen with my time savings.

If efficiency were all that important, people wouldn't kitchens big enough have islands that are 6x10. That's not efficient. They probably wouldn't have ten foot ceilings because it means they are walking up 4 more steps if they have a second floor.

I tend to like cabinets with simple hinges. You can build inset frameless cabinets with butt hinges, but it's an all custom very precision thing. I grew up in a house with traditional stick built cabinetry all over it. In the 45 years my parents owned the house I can't remember a single hinge out of 100s? failing. I've had at least one Euro-adjustable hinge fail over a relatively short period of time in every kitchen I used them in. In one of my work places with old fashioned exposed hinges none of them are failing. In the other workplace with concealed adjustable hinges, the cabinet doors are always out of whack and some of the doors are literally falling off. There is always some facilities person trying to fix them. These are commercial environments so people are hard on things, but in my experience one type is maintenance free the other is not.

I don't like all drawers on bases, because sometimes what I want is on the bottom. I like to be able to get at things from the front or the sides. So I find a mix works for me, I don't think everybody is going to "hate" working in their kitchen if it's not all drawers. I know I won't.

@Aimee - Where are you located (just general region) and what species of wood are you using? I can give you the wood movement factors for your area.

Asking and thinking about wood movement is never a silly question. Wood moves with changes in humidity, it's inevitable, and if you don't take it into accout disaster ensues. There are tables available online that tell you how much each species moves, or take advantage of bry911's kind offer.

You'll have two concerns, avoiding sticking doors in the summer, and avoiding cross-grain glue joints. Wood can move a fair amount across the grain, most woods move very little with the grain. This assymetry is what causes problems when you glue the grain together at a 90 degree angle. The most common place for this to show up is in frame and panel construction where a solid wood panel is glued into a frame. In winter the panel shrinks in width but the rails don't, with the most common outcome being a split in the panel as it rips itself apart (often it sounds like a shotgun when it happens).

As to fitting so that the doors and drawers don't bind, spring and fall are good seasons to work in as they represent an intermediate humidity and you don't need to size for one extreme or the other. You will use the shrinkage factors for your humidity range and wood species to see how big the gap needs to be. Wood should be equilibrated in your environment for several weeks so that it matches your conditions. A moisture meter can be useful to check if you're in a hurry.

Because of the assymetry you can have tighter tolerances with the grain, eg left-right in most construction. This is more of a concern with your drawer fronts as they are often solid boards than with the doors that are more commonly frame and panel. If you make solid wood doors the variation can demand a really big gap, which is why most doors are frame and panel. Using plywood or MDF mostly eliminates the wood movement issue, which is why they are such popular choices in commercial cabinetry.

A nice gift for your husband would be the book "Understanding Wood" by Bruce Hoadley. It addresses all of these concerns and more, as well as being a pleasant read, at least for woodworkers.

@bry911 We are in New Hampshire and using cherry. The drawer boxes we may do in maple.

@rwiegand Very helpful, thanks thanks!

@Aimee - I was just getting ready to calculate this for you using the USDA Equilibrium moisture content table at https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/documnts/fplrn/fplrn268.pdf and the Wood handbook from https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/62200. I thought I would link a video from Jonathan Katz Moses talking about wood movement, when I discovered that he has a calculator available that might work better than my calculation.

His video:

His calculator:

https://kmtools.com/pages/wood-movement-calculator.

I am still happy to calculate it for you, but I am starting to feel old fashioned now that someone actually has a decent calculator. I have always been very proud of my laminated pages from the Wood handbook.

I am assuming that you are doing some type of slab fronts, if you are using cope and stick then you only need to calculate the wood movement across the grain of the rails and stiles of the doors and frame, then just leave the panel floating.

@palimpsest you describe my feelings every time someone posits that inset cabinets have less storage room and all lower cabinets must be drawers. I have had both inset and full and partial overlay cabinetry and the difference in storage space is negligible. I also have a combination of drawers and doors with pullouts and I think both have their place, for me that is.

Making blanket statements like "I have no idea why people still insist on inset designed cabinets" is not helpful and further, is disrespectful to those who have a different opinion. Especially pros on this site should make a distinction between what is bad design and what is just valid preference of one choice over another.

@Aimee YMMV since New England weather is different, but for what it's worth, we have 1/16" gaps for the most part and our cabinets are in an unconditioned kitchen in CA. It doesn't get super cold in our area (rarely below freezing), though it can get hot for short bursts in summer, and we have wet and dry seasons so humidity sways significantly. We haven't had any problems with the cabinets with that tolerance, though the original built-in cabinets in the house are a little tighter and do have seasonal issues [but they are also in rooms that are heated, I realized!]. We do have MDF center panels (our cabinets are painted and our cabinetmaker felt strongly about that to prevent movement) and our cabinet doors use butt hinges vs. Euro-style hinges; no idea how much either of those things impacts it.

Haha, good one @bry911!!

@bry911 That’s too funny, I’m the boss in this kitchen remodel too! Slab drawer fronts and shaker doors. This photo is my inspiration. It’s from a local cabinet maker and I think it has a nice New England feel.

@bry911 I hear you Bree, happy wife happy life.

I love your inspiration photo, @Aimee. Crown Point Cabinetry is a quality manufacturer and you can view lots of beautiful options on their website. After all your waiting for a new kitchen, you should get what you want.

Same--their cabinets are like eye candy! We have the same configuration (shaker doors with slab drawers) and I really like it--we debated whether the drawers should be shaker or slab. Our frameless cabinets do have shaker drawer fronts (with the idea that they would echo the look of the inset cabinetry across the room--rails and stiles are the same width as the face frames) and while they're lovely, they are soooo much more of a pain to clean--really glad we stuck with slab for the inset.

There is no way to determine wood movement withoiut knowing exactly what you are using and its moisture contect to begin with. Wood expands across the grain vs lenthwise. Movement should be minimal if say a drawer isnt made out of one board vs several orineted to minimize movement.

So much bad info here and if this is his or her first go round with building cabinets you are much better starting with plywood do to its stability. If you like slab fronts edge banding simple veneered plywood will remove 75% of the work needed to prep 4/4 stick of wood into a drawer front. You can also use MDF veneered panels for your doors again limiting needed abailities and possible movement.

Veneers are widely used in high end furniture and will make your job much easier and better in the end dealing with inexperience.

Also note cherry wood changes color drastically which could be a positive or negative. Staining a cherry kitchen for teh first time will most likley leave you with a much different look then picture as you will have a lot of variation. Uisng dyes can even out the tones but again not for the first timer.

good luck!

I always wonder at the frequent advice that "first timer's shouldn't do XYZ". How do you ever get to be second timer without taking the plunge? As I've commented before part of being dedicated as a DIY'er is to expect to screw up and have to re-do work until you get it right. As my dad liked to say, "education is expensive". If you pay attention, seek the help of experts, and re-do as necessary to achieve a good result after a while you'll get pretty good at most of this stuff. Yes, there is tuition to be paid along the way.

For the record, I find dyes to be much more forgiving and easy to use than pigment stains, even moreso since I got a good spray setup, which is why I have almost never used pigment stains since the infamous pumpkin orange maple floor. I just took a week-long finishing class to help get over that 40 year old trauma and now can approach pigment stains with some equanimity for the first time. Learning to (almost) never put them on raw wood was a really important revalation.

@GANNONCO LLC I believe he plans to use plywood for the ”structure” and solid cherry for the face frame and doors and drawer fronts. I did a lot or research and back and forth with wood types and decided I want unstained cherry. I‘m fine with color change and variation.

@rwiegand Thats exactly how all the projects go here, lol. He just did hardwood floors in our bedroom for the first time and it probably took him 5x as long as a pro but they look professional and next time it will probably go faster!