This week was all about drawers.  I got the bottoms made for all of the drawers requiring 1/4 inch bottoms.  Then, I got all of the drawer bodies glued up.

Even after making literally dozens of drawers over my woodworking life, it always spooks me when I glue them up, how absolutely awful the joinery looks until it is properly sanded and finished.

I really do not like the style of drawers we had to make for this kitchen.  But because we had to use the stupid European hinges for the cabinet doors (because we could not find decent looking half-lap hinges), we had to build the drawers as basically a wood box with a face panel glued on it.

The problem is, the stupid European hinges hold the door fully outside the face frame of the cabinet.  With the old-school half lap hinges, the cabinet door edge actually sits halfway inside the face frame of the cabinet – I.E. It only protrudes 3/8 inch outside the face frame.  But because we have to have the front of the cabinet doors and the front of the drawers protrude the same amount in front of the face frames, this was really the only way to go.

After making all of the drawer bodies, I was able to begin making the face panels.

In this case, Tina chose a really simple design for the drawer fronts.  It is just a Red Oak panel with a simple 1/2 inch roundover around the edges.

She chose this style due to the high amount of dust in the desert.  Anything with any type fillet or ogee would collect an insane amount of dust.  But this incredibly simple design does nothing to showcase my woodworking abilities.  And frankly, the whole reason for having kitchen cabinets (or even an indoor kitchen for that matter) is to show off my woodworking skills.  After all, Tina has done just fine for the last 8 months cooking our meals on a propane camp stove and storing her cooking stuff in plastic bins hidden away in a closet somewhere.

Figuring out how to glue the face panel to the drawer body and keep it straight was also a bit of a challenge.  The problem is, wood glue is extremely slippery when it is wet.  So, keeping the drawer body straight with the face would be a challenge without some kind of process in place while the glue is wet.  I have to admit that I was proud of myself for the solution I came up with.

I started by cutting some scrap wood to the width of the inset I wanted for the drawer body and clamping it to the face panel.  Then I drove 3-4 wire brads about 1/4 inch into the face panel.

I nipped the head of the wire brads off with a pair of dykes about 1/8 – 1/4 inch proud of the face panel.

Then I coated the front of the drawer body with a good amount of yellow glue and spread it around into a nice even coat with a rubber roller.

The wire brads allowed me to get it perfectly positioned before I clamped it down.  Since the cut ends of the brads were embedded into the drawer body before the glue surfaces ever touched, I had no problems with slippage.

Of course, some of the more odd shaped drawers required us to come up some unusual ways of clamping them.

But in the end, I am pretty happy with how they came out.

Before Tina started the finishing process, I did rough fit all of the drawer glides and made sure we could at fit them into holes they were built for.

Presently they are awful tight on the drawer glides and will need quite a bit of fine adjustment.  But I will do that when we do the final fitting.

But they sure look plain.  I really pray the finishing and hardware dresses them up some because right now our kitchen looks like it was made by a 3 year-old from crating lumber.

The real killer this week was a drawer that I had not even originally planned on making.  It is a very and deep drawer, but also very short.  It is under the double ovens.  It is one of those things that was not part of the original plan, but I found myself with some extra space and did not know what to do with it.  So I decided to make a drawer that is 24 inches deep, almost 30 inches wide and only 4 inches tall.  I figured, under the ovens, it would be a great place for Tina to store her cookie trays.  Thus we dubbed it the “Cookie Drawer”.

I had a set of cheap 100# drawer glides left over from building our Minnesota kitchen.  I remember I did not like them which is why I chose to go with another brand, but I could not remember why.  Anyway, I thought the cookie drawer is something Tina is going to opening at most, once or twice per week (except during Christmas) and it is never going to hold much weight.  So I decided to use the cheap drawer glides I had rather than paying shipping for a good set.

Bad idea!

When I was trying to rough fit the drawer into the glide, I was not even pushing hard, the entire bearing assembly on the left side blew apart into hundreds of pieces!

Needless to say, I was not happy!

I’ll get a new and better set of drawer glides and somehow figure out how to make it work, but damn this one is depressing.

Beyond that, Tina got started finishing drawers.

The joinery does come out looking nice once Tina gets done with her magic.

And I got all of the towel racks and mirrors up in the bathrooms.

Once we get the drawers done and fitted, we are going to take a week or two off from building, to move all of our stuff from the rental house.  Our lease is up at the end of March and we really do not want to extend even though the house has quite a bit of work left.  So this week we are going to pick up a 20 foot storage container that we can store some of our stuff in while we complete the build and make sure we get our stuff moved out of the rental.  Therefore, I may or may not make posts over the next couple weeks. – Building is cool and folks like to read about that; moving, not so much.