Drawer slides are expensive. Do this instead.

Drawer hardware is

expensive

. I'm going to show you how I saved $1,300 by making super simple cabinets without any hardware and they look good too. I'll also reveal the secret to finding the best plywood without getting ripped off in

this

ingenuity episode. is sponsored by Simply Safe the game plan wait wrong channel

this

is the design my friend Steve and I came up with now the requirements for this build were simple I needed at least 10 feet of storage B I want the storage to look good Number Roman 3 I want the

drawer

s to be standardized so they can be moved as my needs change, they also need to be easy to build and lastly, here's the big one, they need to be affordable.

I priced several

drawer

slide options and the most

expensive

was $1,300 for 36 sets and the least expensive was $900, so here's the challenge for this build. I'm going to try to build this 10 foot wall of cabinets for less than the price of the drawer. Just the hardware now will be tweaked, but I think I might be able to do it. Get it out since my big table saw is still on the injured reserve list after taking an unplanned bath. I will be making these cabinets using a chain saw 95% of the time. This is good for you because it gives me the opportunity.

To share with you three brilliant tips and tricks that I have found that will help you improve any project you do with plywood. This first one is from Jason Ben, so unsubscribe from his channel if you haven't already before making any cuts. If you want to deal with the factory Edge, which is probably damaged, it's very easy: simply align your track about 3mm from the factory Edge and make your first cut, after that all your cuts will reference this clean Edge and I admit it. This is the first time I've done this on a project before because I'm usually in a rush to get started and I'm embarrassed that I didn't adopt this sooner.

Doing this ensured that all my cuts were perfect using this high quality plywood. The second tip is to use parallel guides. They make things faster and easier. I saw people using them and for a long time I didn't understand what the advantage was, so if so, let me explain. By having a table saw guide in hand for your chain saw, with these twist stops you can set the desired width in reference to one edge of the piece and, without marking or measuring, you can make repeat cuts just as you would on the table saw. Cut a sheet of plywood in minutes with precision due to a well-planned cut list and these parallel guides.

The third tip is closely related and that is that if you have parallel guides, you don't need to have a really long track, which is the length. of your material, you can get by with just a standard 55 track, you can move your track down the other half of the length after your first cut, and since you're referencing the same Edge, you get a perfect cut every time. I have done. I've never seen anyone do this or talk about it, so this is me trying to take credit for the idea, but we all know someone else thought of it first.

While I was working, my wife came out and told me that it might rain and that it would probably be a good idea to bring the wood from my table saw inside. When I looked at the forecast it said it wouldn't rain, so we had a slight argument about who was right and I won and left the plywood outside 20 minutes later. When I finished celebrating my victory I noticed this crap 60% of the time she is right every time she talks about losing battles before showing them how to assemble the cabinet and drawers. We need to go back in time when I tried to buy good plywood for this project, the price, oh my word, the best sheet of plywood I could find was $79 and it still had its gaps and problems, that's not ideal.

The problem is that I need plywood today, tomorrow at the latest. I don't want to pay $80 for Junk, I just want good quality plywood, so I'm going to try another store, maybe we'll get lucky, so I walked across the street to the Blue store and it turned out the price of Junk was also $79 there so it was a waste of time. In my last city I found a small company that deals directly with professional cabin manufacturers. The plywood I got there was usually half the price of what I could find at a big box store and two or three times the quality I get in the DFW area.

Now I'm going to try to find one of those places, I don't think I'll be able to find one right away so I'll go to Google Plywood Company in Fort Worth and maybe that's it. a good start I literally googled a plywood company in fort worth and found this company called no joke, fort worth plywood company. I thought it might be an online scam until I showed up and sure enough, that's the name of the company. It is peaked inside and looks like a professional showroom. I'm a little nervous because they only sell to professionals and wouldn't sell to a normal guy like me, in case that happens.

I brought a secret weapon that is foolproof that when you look at it, they will welcome me and sell it to anyone at both prices. Let's try it now. I was a little scared, but with this solid strategy I entered the showroom and met a guy standing guard and after an awkward steering competition I said the secret password. and this happened, come on, now this place has it all, they even have plywood made from mappa Burl. I thought about making my cabinets with it until I saw it was $1,500 a sheet now, since I don't have Jackary Battery sponsor money, I decided. to move on and when I walked through the showroom I found a helicopter posing as a fan, the biggest, cleanest aisles I've ever seen in a Walnut lumber yard on every corner here and here and finally found some solid plywood options to try Now available, the first blade I bought to try was $40.

I wanted to see if it would work and bought another top grade one for 80 just to see if there was a difference. I bought a little of each to compare and see if I can get away with it. with the use of a $40 option in the future, don't you just hate it when YouTubers are lazy and go for that tired, worn-out SpongeBob transition? Yes, that's the worst the next day. Now the best part of all this is that I bought over $450. MDF plywood and black laminate. They delivered my order the next day for free even though I live 40 minutes away and here are all the parts you need to make a cabinet.

You don't need to waste plywood building a top or bottom. you only need 3 inch stretchers and one of the stretchers at the bottom will be a little larger because of the toe, we'll talk more about the toe in a moment but here you can see that this is actually what makes up each cabinet now. on the bottom i'm gluing a spacer just so the bottom drawer doesn't slide all the way to the bottom and sometimes that plywood wants to bend when you cut it, here's how to fix that now a lot of people building this cabinet would probably cut doos in the sides of these cabinets using a data sheet on the table saw or some type of router bit.

I've done that before and I don't like doing it for a couple of reasons, first, it makes a lot of sawdust, it makes noise, it makes a mess and I inevitably ruin it, but most importantly it weakens the sides of the cabinet and that's what happened on my last one. Workshop Now, if you are a beginner or even an intermediate carpenter, building a cabin cinet seems out of reach and very intimidating, but this design is so easy that you don't need many special tools. The only trick is that there is some complex math involved if you want standardized drawers that can move, the good news is we did all this in a plan that you can download immediately and if you want to build it or hack it and modify it to your needs it's super easy.

I can't imagine spending $120 per cabinet on pull hardware, check it out. Now the first cabinet you saw me build was the Prototype just to work out all the math and once I got it squared away I was able to build all the other cabinets very quickly and I couldn't wait to line them up to see them in person. about what my new cabinets would look like in the space now, here's how I made that template. I ripped out a piece of plywood that was the exact thickness of my space and simply glued a reference piece at 90°, then glued another piece of scrap on the top and bottom to reference the front edge of where the false fronts would be.

I wasn't sure if this jig would be square and accurate, but I made the remaining five cabinets using this and they came out perfect every time, it's really satisfying too. make a little jig like this on the go and at work and if you wanted to make cabinets like this you could stack them and have a tall set of cabinets with all kinds of drawers now when I started building cabinets one of the things I was confused about during I've been wondering how to do toe kicks for a long time and a lot of times you'll see people just cut them off the side of the cabinet.

I don't like doing that and I first came up with this idea when I saw this, no. -beginner YouTuber name Mark spagnolia I think it's his name and he showed how you just build a different base that's shallower and this is what I'm doing here: I'm building my strut separately, a couple of reasons why you might want to do this . First of all, it has a cleaner look and you don't need to put a jigsaw or band saw on the sides of the cabinets, but most importantly, it is much easier to level this base and then place all the cabinets on it. it and then cut the tip. kicks in each of your cabinets and then you have to level all of your cabinets individually.

Now my garage floor slopes quite a bit and for good reason, this is actually what you want in case you have an unfortunate water leak, we're not going to go. To talk about it, you want the water to drain outside, so the way you do that is with shims. At first all I had were some wooden wedges and I didn't have enough so I was going to have to go to the store and buy some. more and that's when my friend Jason Bent told me that he should probably buy composite shims. I asked him why and he said they are more consistent and I never thought about the inconsistency of wood shims but he was absolutely right.

He may have overstepped me. the wedges I call wedges in this chapter because of the wedges that stuck out. I just used my oscillating tool to cut them out, they were pretty easy and like a kid at Christmas I wanted to see what my cabinets looked like so I temporarily placed them all in there and look at that space. I mean, probably most garages will have a gap like this, but I'll show you a way around it. Too easy. I found this piece of plywood that I brought from my last house that I lived outside in one. point and it started growing mold or mildew, you can see it right there, so

instead

of throwing it away I thought I could just write this by laying it flat on the floor, setting my saw on that line and then I just cut it off easily, clamped the other .

The side

instead

took the clipping and wrote it again and with the magic of YouTube and watch this now. Ideally, you'll probably want to use a four-inch sheet of plywood or something for this, but this is all I had, so I used my 3M sander with I pulled out sandpaper and quickly sanded down what I think was a fungus growing on this plywood, a little glue and some clamps and maybe a little one or two extra nails, let me know if you go overboard with the nails too. ask me I couldn't even tell if the floor was uneven now this end I will fix with an end panel.

I'll show you in a moment, but man, the city never looks so good and in case we ever sell this house which at some point we probably will. I left a little note here in case someone ever breaks this. I want you to know who is responsible for this. Now is the time I've been waiting for to finally install the cabinets so I can start making things. Now that end doesn't look very good and before we fix that we're going to hold all the cabinets together and make sure they're level, like they are now, I'm going to screw them all together and then once that's done I'm going to screw them together. the studs that go through the studs use some shims to make up the difference between the drywall.

I don't know about you but I need more clamps so if you have a keen eye you probably noticed there was a rough drywall repair behind where my upper cabinets are going to go on a whim I cut a small hole to see if there were any insulation in this part of the garage and there isn't any and that's why I wanted to take this time to put insulation on it so that in the future I don't have to rip out these cabinets just to insulate this part of the garage. That's probably not how you want to do it, but my dad and I just cut a section behind wherethe upper cabinets would go and we slid some in. fiberglass bats and then we repaired it, you can't even say I did anything right, a random troll commented and said I should probably tape and cover the joints for maximum protection, but that sounds like a lot of work so I put a poll on Instagram. wondering if I should tape it up or tape it up and put it down and wouldn't you know the internet wants to see more duct tape content on YouTube and from an airflow isolation standpoint.

I really don't know if this duct tape will work functionally. Do anything for me, but the Internet decided, so let me know what you think and boy, if someone buys this house and removes these cabinets, they're going to be in for an incredible surprise. Before making a single cut, I made sure all my cuts. I would be behind where my upper cabinets are so this nonsense would be covered a few months ago while my family was out of town we had a water line burst and it flooded my store for days causing $80,000 in damage. I regret not having a comprehensive system as just insurance because if I had I would have been immediately notified of the problem and we could have worked to get the neighbors to turn off our water.

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Simply Safe agents can now see, talk to, and deflect intruders so you don't have to. You are not the only person who travels during the holidays. You know who else makes the sticky bandits and, even worse, the wet bandits. It's time to ensure the security of your home, your family and the packages you order online, unlike traditional home security systems, Simply Safe never locks you into a long-term contract or charges you hidden fees. Save 40% on your Simply Safe security system when you sign up. Get ready for fast protection monitoring and get your first month free visit Simplysafe Docomo works to personalize yours.

There is no security like Simplysafe. Now it was time to make the DIY laminate countertop, something I had never done before. I noticed some dark clouds so to avoid that. another I told you so. By the time I went ahead and cut this MDF in half, this is a 10 ton long piece of MDF, it was very heavy using the chain saw. I was able to trim the ends to exactly 10 feet. I may have forgotten to turn. on the vacuum using the parallel guides again I was able to mark the exact width I want this counter to be which is 24 inches and referencing one of the edges I was able to trim both sides of the other side and then I flip that around and trim the other side , that makes a lot of sense.

I've seen a lot of people on social media make their own countertops using black for Mica and this was the most stressful part of the build because this 5x1 12 sheet of black laminate was $150 and using contact cement, you have a chance now. I was really worried about cutting myself with this and I didn't have a scoring blade so I thought I could probably use my track saw and it worked great. I even invented this new jump track saw. cutting method my strategy here was to laminate the ends first and then the front edge and then at the end once I felt comfortable I would put on the top.

I stared at this piece of laminate for a couple of hours thinking things through while watching YouTube. videos on how to do it and I had to call for backup. I mentioned to my dad that he was doing this and he asked me if he wanted help. I said yes and he drove there that night and there is no way I could have done this successfully without him, it's a pretty simple process, you put contact cement on the back of your laminate and then on your substrate. I needed to do three coats each, you let them dry until they're pretty tacky, as soon as they touch, they're stuck now if you're thinking three coats really look at how this MDF absorbs this contact cement now in real time.

I thought it was crazy, but looking back it accelerated. I'm surprised. I left the leaves about a/4 in pride all the way. around so I can come over with my trimming router, which is upside down to show you which way I should do it and cut it out now making this 10 foot long piece by myself. I'm sure the pros know a trick on how to do it, but there is no way I was going to do this successfully the first time on my own and having extra C on my hands totally helped me too. I think I'm going bald, that's fun, welcome to the 40 battery swap and if you ever make this eye and ear protection. protection nose protection this is disgusting my dad brought a file with him that has a name I can't say on YouTube now this is a cool trick I've seen on social media and I've never tried it is you Take painter's tape and make a V on top of your can of paint or contact cement and then pour it in, which makes it a lot easier, but the best part, and I'll show you at the end, is when you remove the tape from your tire. perfectly clean, meaning you can resell this for later use.

I just poured this directly onto the MDF and tried to roll it as fast as I could. This is in real time. I haven't sped up this video, in fact, I sped it up, uh, but we. was very, very quick, we placed a bunch of these slats on top of the contact cement after it had dried, which would allow us to temporarily lay the laminated top in a line and then one by one, from the center, working towards outside, we can pull the slats and make contact all the way. This is the first time I've done this and since it's the first time I think it turned out pretty well, but what the pros say is that you start in the middle and then work your way to the other. sides and after all that stress of literally thinking about this all day hoping not to screw it up because that would be a very costly mistake, it worked until I went to mill the edges and ladies and gentlemen, I think it's a tip for you or a opportunity for you to tell me what I did wrong.

This entire counter turned out flawless except for the edge and I think what happened was that he was pushing the bearing too hard, but in this shot that's not the case. It looks like I'm pressing hard, but if I'll show you a close up here in a moment of some marks that came around the edge where the router bit barely cut through the laminate when trimming, this took all of it. night to do it because we took our time. I think we finished around 10:30 at night. Clean the cover. Check out the tape trick is awesome. I found some half inch pieces of plywood that I placed against the interior panel that needs to be covered and this notch here is for the baseboard.

I measured roughly where I need to cut and took some double sided tape made in the USA and made a temporary fence so I can take my oscillating tool and cut this because I hate puzzles, do you like tearing, how is it? start?, no one will see it. I used a file to clean up a couple of edges so I could sneak up on the fit. Then I used the pencil just to mark where everything went. It only took me about 5-10 minutes to cut this side panel to make it fit perfectly and of course I had to put a special message written in glue on the side of this panel before I attached it and Brad nailed it and when I put it all together you don't see any of the shims you don't see the bottom base matches the counter perfectly now I had about 36 drawer bottoms to sand and prep and this was a very satisfying point in the build where I tried the Fit of all the bottoms which are also the runners due to how the drawer is designed now, one of the goals of this build was to build it without any hard materials and I tried a few handle options that would simply involve cutting a hole but I didn't like them and I really wanted something physical to put on so I found several 3D printed design options that flexed too much and I suspected they wouldn't hold up to use, so I'm cheating a little and found these PES with metal drawers, but they're about $150 each, they're really solid and cheap, so this is the part where I put on some headphones and went into a madness to make all the drawers.

Sorry, it's pronounced draw now, the easiest way I found to assemble pocket hole screws is to just put them in parallel clamps like you would if you were gluing things together and that way you can sneak up on the fit and then just drive the screws home . I've tried tons of other clamps and they never seem to get it right. Please let me know if you have found a better way to assemble many pocket screw joints in a different way, but for me right now this is the best. What I came up with with this is the part of the build where a lot of the payoff is starting to happen because I'm seeing my brain in real time, in reality, in the physical world, and all things are working now. when it was time to add the funds.

I was going to make a template but I thought it would be the easiest and I just measured the center on one of the drawers and since all of these sorry drawings are exactly the same, this works on all 36 draws in there. Let's go with one of the draws marked in the center. I just transferred all the measurements so I can line up the center line I did similarly on all the bottoms 36 times, rinse and repeat, I'm not going to bore you with On the first pair I made, I was very cautious and made sure to line it up perfectly and I very carefully put two clamps on and turned it around and as I got comfortable, you'll see how I adjusted now.

I'm not using glue. on purpose in case I ever need to repair them, basically what I did was turn them upside down. I put a clamp in place. I lined up the first line. I nailed it on one side. I turned her around and squared her. I nailed that side and then ran nails all the way around. Now a trick that really helped is that I took a combo square and measured the distance the bottom of the drawer sticks out and I was able to transfer it to the bottom of the drawer. drawing and that gave me a visual reference on where to nail the bottom here, you can see how this really works now, after 35 drawings put together, I didn't miss a single nail and this was the last drawing of the drawer and as you can see when Dale back to this I missed a nail on the last one I'm kidding, it was perfect I can't believe it I didn't miss a nail once, has that happened to you?

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do it. Handle the handles and while you could cut a shape that would look amazing, you would have to cut that shape twice because it is a false front, so with these metal handles the only drawback is that a slight gap needs to be cut. the back of the false front so that the false front lies flat against the front of the drawer. I thought this was going to be a hassle, but it was actually very easy to set up a router table which is just a really simple DIY router table that I made. using some stop blocks setting the cutting depth using the hardware itself I was able to cut this mortise similar to what you would see on a door now normally my perfectionism would get to me and force me to cut the short and then finish it off with a chisel so that all the corners They are square, but this is the third week of construction.

It takes about 10 times as long a project when you're shooting videos for YouTube, I realized that no one is going to see the back of these false fronts. So I just routed them a little deeper so I didn't have to take a chisel to square them up. I am very happy and impressed with how stylish these $11.50 PES metal drawers look. I know they're storefront cabinets and they're supposed to be a little sloppy, but I can't stop looking at them. I mean, I'm very happy with myself and proud of the work I did four years ago. I bought the plans for these upper cabinets from fixing this build I love them so much.

I'm building them a second time for this new setup. They are the easiest upper cabinets to build. I built four Ft's worth of units in half a day for under $200. My favorite part about them is that the interior shelf is half the depth allowing you to use the back of the doors for storage and if you use a Adjustable shelf pin template can customize the location of each horizontal shelf you place in the cabinet. I'll link to Brad's video and plans on the old dbox and here's a tip for installing cabinets yourselfEven if you are screwing a horizontal board like a straight 2x4 to the wall, if you can find one you can move the stud locations to the back of the cabinets.

Pre-drill the screws and with one hand hold the cabinet in place while screwing. the studs now instead of using a temporary shelf like I just explained. I went ahead and installed my plywood backsplash first so I could use it to set up. the cabinets in my next video, I'll show off a bunch of cool tool holders that I'll screw to this plywood backer to hold my most used tools. The pegboard is for kids, subscribe if you want to watch it now for the six people still watching. I have a secret that I want to tell you and that you will love before I tell it.

Let's see if I failed or managed to build these cabinets for less than $900, the amount I would have spent on the cheaper drawer.

slides

on its own, the nice thing about this design is that a single lower cabinet with six drawers requires one 3/4 sheet and one sheet of plywood. I built six of them, so I needed six sheets of each size of plywood most of the time. The plywood I bought was top quality 3/4 domestic stock for $80 each, while now it was basically a dollar more than what I found at the big box stores, the quality of this one was much higher, so although I spent the same amount.

I got significantly better material, however, I bought some cheaper imported plywood for $40 to use for the upper cabinets and if I had to do this over I would have bought it for everything because it was just as good as the expensive one, just with a close lower grade and I don't really care about that if you include the cost of the black laminated MDF drawer PS screws glue contact cement roller J and this Craig plywood bracket that saved my back I spent a total of $1,222 182 on the lower Just the cabinets, I guess I didn't pass the $900 test, but it's cheaper than if I had gone the bloom route now.

If I had used the cheaper import plywood instead of the $80 domestic plywood, that total would have come to $981 and would have been much closer. For my purpose, this was outside the scope of this video, but while I was building it I decided to build these upper cabinets, put them in there at the end and I spent a total of $221 on those cabinets which included drawer posts and these. LED lights, so my total cost for this entire 10t wall of lower upper cabinets with a counter and LED lights is $1,444 43 now, even though I technically broke the budget and didn't meet my goal. cheaper than if I had built these cabinets and bought all those drawer

slides

, so here's the reward for those of you who are still looking.

Did they really think I was going to tape the drywall? They weren't looking, in fact, I put duct tape on the drywall seams because I'm not an animal. Now the cool thing about this is that if you look in the comments below, all the people who didn't see this ending and who feel a little provoked by my use of it. duct tape, they're probably going to comment on it, so if you want to have a good laugh, you can go to the comments section and look for all those people criticizing me for using duct tape or praising me for using duct tape and all those people. by commenting that way, you and I will know that they didn't watch to the end and if you are watching to the end and you see those comments, would you leave a comment and somewhere in the comment would you use the snorkel emoji like that? everyone else will know you hit the bottom if you want to build cabinets like these and support the channel check out the link below if you like the vibe join my dad's tribe on patreon woo