Making shaker cabinet doors from scrap wood

Today's post is how I built some shaker cabinet doors from scrap wood I had laying around. Now all the wood used was from previous projects. The only thing I bought was the cabinet hinges. So lets get started. You can see that this board here has a wet stain on one of the edges. Not sure how that happened. But it's still a solid and firm piece of plywood so I’ll still be using it for one of the doors.

Both the boards have a big bend in the center. So, I’ll have to find a way to get that straighten out in the future. Maybe by putting a piece of metal bar on the center of the door or something. I’m not sure yet, if you have suggestions, please let me know.

The doors are short by about an inch so I’ll be adding an extra piece to each one of the doors so they can be at the right size. The additional wood strips that I’m adding will be covered when I glue some face boards on top of them. Those face boards will help not only to cover the strip but also it will give the cabinet doors the shaker design. So, I’ll be cutting out a total of 8 pieces that will be glued around both of the doors to give them that shaker door look. I had never tried giving them the shaker design by adding face boards on top of a piece of plywood, but I saw someone else on YouTube use this same method and they ended up looking pretty good. So, let's hope I get the same great results as well.

With a little bit of sanding, we’re able to get the stained board cleaned up and looking much better. Those boards are now looking like new again. Now it's time to glue everything together, I always make sure to use a whole lot of clamps just to make sure the trim boards and the plywood stick well on all areas, this way we prevent any ungluing, I make sure to start clamping on one edge and continue to add clamps until I reach the other end.

Of course, you have to be adjusting the clamps to make sure the boards won’t move around as you start to clamp down. You can never have too many clamps, just when you think you finished clamping, you end up seeing an area where the boards are not joining together correctly. I sometimes end up running out of clamps and I have to resort to putting heavy objects on top to try and compress boards together. So always have enough clamps available. Once everything is clamped down, we just leave the boards overnight to make sure the glue dries properly.

The next day I begin to unclamp the trims I glued. Everything looks to be glued correctly. The strips I added are now firmly glued in place and you can see how they got covered by the shaker face trim. I think that’s how it's called guys. Let me know if I’m saying it wrong in the comments section.

The following day, it’s time to drill the holes where the hinges will go. This is not the ideal drill bit to use to drill the holes out, because I can end up perforating the other end with the pointy tip. But since I do not own the correct drill bit used to make the holes, I had no choice but to use this drill bit first just to make the top of the hole and then I had to chisel out the rest. Sometimes you have to find ways to improvise when you don’t have the proper tools available.

Not the best-looking holes but the hinges fit quite well. These hinges have the soft closing feature on them. These cost about $8 for a pair. So, these were the most expensive part of the doors since it’s the only thing I had to buy.

Now that I got the holes out of the way, its just time to start painting them, the color we are using again is the ocean boulevard with the interior eggshell enamel finish. So, we just take our paint brush and start to paint both sides of the doors.

The paint dried up pretty fast, so I was able to finish painting both doors in about an hour. After that I just screw on the hinges and proceed to take them inside to install.

If you’ve made it until this part. I will just say thank you for your time. I will have some more great content for you all soon. Thank you so much for your time and have a great rest of your day. Oh, and remember, live free and try DIY'ing.