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jenniestowe_gw

Thoughts on Dovetailed Cabinet Drawers?

jenniestowe
11 years ago

My husband and I have found a local cabinetmaker/woodworker to make cabinets for our new kitchen. He does beautiful work and I think he'll do a wonderful job. He's making the cabinet carcasses out of birch plywood and the face frames out of beech. We've decided on poplar drawer fronts (we're not having doors, only drawers) as we want to paint them.

He's suggested plywood for the drawer boxes (maybe I'm using the wrong term, but I mean for the sides and bottoms of the drawers) and stapling/gluing them together. We really had in mind something more like dovetailed drawers, with the drawers being made all of solid wood (with perhaps the exception of the bottoms being plywood). What's most important to us is to have cabinets/drawers that feel solid and durable and lovely as well.

I'm curious as to what people think. Will plywood drawers that are glued/stapled, feel substantially cheaper than solid wood drawers? My understanding is that from a technical perspective, dovetailing was developed when there weren't other methods of joining two pieces of wood at an angle such as there are now (strong glues, etc.). Nevertheless, I associated dovetailing with a certain solidity.

Overall our kitchen is going to be simple but, we hope, nice. We are having base cabinets only (supplemented by a shelf above the backsplash). We are hoping to salvage the original fir floors as well as the original subway tile backsplash (from 1927). We are leaning toward marble counters. We found a 1940s Universal stove on craigslist. So you get a sense of our aesthetic.

Very interested to hear people's perspectives.

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