Posted by Kitchen Design

Here is a free kitchen base cabinet plan with dimensions.

Building your own kitchen isn't really that hard. After all, a kitchen is basically a collection of boxes and panels. Let's have a look at a simple construction technique for building a frameless kitchen base cabinet.

You can build kitchen cabinets from a variety of materials ranging from melamine to plywood to various timber veneers. For this cabinet however, I am going to stick with 16mm (5/8") thick melamine. Melamine is great for kitchen cabinets as it is easy to clean and therefore hygenic. It does not need finishing or lacquering and it is extremely hard wearing and durable.

Melamine can be made from either particle board or an MDF (medium density fibreboard) substrate. I choose to use particle board when building cabinets as it is much lighter than MDF.

A frameless kitchen cabinet has 5 parts. These parts are:

• End panel (left and right)
• Back
• Base
• Fixing rail

The end panels form the left and right sides of the cabinet. These panels can be drilled to accomodate adjustable shelves, drawers, partitions and various types of kitchen cabinet hardware such as bins.

The base, fixing rail and back are fastened to the left and right end panels with wood screws and the joint is nothing but a simple butt joint.

To work out the kitchen cabinet dimensions you need to know a few details first. Firstly, you need to know at what height (and depth) you would like to have your countertop positioned (for ergonomics this is normally 900mm off the floor and 600mm in depth), how thick will your countertop be (normally somewhere between 20 to 40mm thick) and lastly the required height of your toe kick (normally between 100 to 150mm high).

I normally make my kitchen cabinet carcases 720mm high x 560mm deep (it can vary so don't worry). This allows me to have a 20mm thick door with a countertop overhanging the door by 20mm.

Now, let's say you needed a 600mm wide kitchen cabinet and you required a 600 x 40mm countertop 900mm off the floor that would mean your toe kick height would be 900 - 720 - 40 = 140mm high.

Now we can work out our kitchen cabinets parts for a 600mm wide cabinet by simple calculation.

Since the base, back and fixing rail sit between the end panels you subtract 32mm (16 + 16) from the overall required cabinet width to determine their width.

600mm - 32 = 568mm

Therefore our end panels will be 720mm high x 560mm deep, the back will be 720mm high x 568mm wide and the base will be 568mm wide by 544mm deep (cut it 16mm less than the cabinet depth so it will butt into the back for screw fixing).

The toe kick (for which the cabinet will sit on) can be made as a simple ladder frame or you can use adjustable legs.

Hope this helps.

Tags: frameless kitchen cabinet, free kitchen cabinet plans, Kitchen Cabinet Plans