Dovetail drawer boxes, built to the sizes you give us. Solid sides, dovetailed corners, a captured bottom, and notching for undermount slides done before it reaches you. No minimum, and the same boxes go into our own kitchens.

How they are made

  • Dovetailed corners, not doweled and not stapled. It is the joint your customer opens the drawer and looks at, and it is the one that survives a house move.
  • A captured bottom housed into all four sides, so the bottom carries weight instead of hanging off glue.
  • Sanded and ready, prefinished or unfinished, whichever suits how you are handling the rest of the job.

Sizing, and the rule that causes returns

Give us the box size you want, not the cabinet opening. This is the single most common way a drawer box order goes wrong, because the allowance depends on the slide you have chosen and on nothing we can see from here.

Undermount slides take their clearance from the box width and need the bottom set at a particular height, so a box sized from the opening by the wrong allowance will not latch. Tell us the slide brand and length and we will work to its clearance; tell us the box size and we will cut exactly that.

Notching and boring for undermount slides

Say which slide you are running and the boxes arrive notched for it. That is a jig you do not have to set up and a step you do not have to schedule around. Blum, Salice and Grass are all routine; if you run something else, tell us what it is rather than guessing at an equivalent.

It is probably not the comparison you think you are making

A true dovetail in solid stock needs a dedicated machine. Not a router jig — a dovetailer, which most one- and two-person shops do not own and cannot justify. So when a shop costs building its own boxes against buying them, what it is really costing is a dadoed or doweled plywood box — because that is what the tooling in the shop can actually produce.

That makes it the wrong comparison. The choice is not your dovetailed box against this one. It is your plywood box against a dovetailed one — and those two things do not sell for the same money.

The one joint your customer actually inspects

Nobody takes a door apart. Everybody opens a drawer, and most people open it on the walkthrough, before they have decided how they feel about the kitchen. A dovetailed solid box with a captured bottom is the detail that makes the whole job read as expensive, and a stapled plywood box is the detail that makes it read as builder-grade however good the fronts are.

So this is not only a cost argument. Buying boxes in can raise what the kitchen is worth, which is a different and better lever than saving an hour.

What twelve drawers actually costs you

A kitchen with twelve drawers is twelve boxes, forty-eight dovetailed corners and twelve bottoms to cut, fit and finish. The arithmetic that matters is not the material, it is the machine time and the bench space while the rest of the job waits. Most shops find the line somewhere around twenty boxes a week — above that, the run owns the shop for a day.

The costs that never reach the cut list

Bench space

Boxes are bulky while they are in pieces and bulkier once assembled. Twelve of them occupy the assembly table for the day, and everything else in the job queues behind them.

Jig setup

Dovetail spacing, bottom groove depth, then the undermount notch on a second setup. The same couple of hours whether the run is four boxes or forty, which is why the small orders are the expensive ones.

Sizing to the slide

An undermount box a sixteenth over does not latch. That is not a reprint, it is a return trip to a kitchen you have already installed, and the client remembers it.

Thin solid stock

Half-inch and five-eighths maple sides mean resawing and re-flattening, or buying thin stock most suppliers do not keep. It is the quiet reason shops end up in plywood.

Run it on your own numbers

Count the machine and bench hours the last twelve-drawer kitchen took you, multiply by the rate you bill install at — not your shop cost, the rate you charge, because that is what the hour could have earned — and set it against the delivered price for the same list on the drawer box pages, which price themselves as you enter sizes. Then add the part most shops leave out: what the dovetailed interior lets you charge that the plywood one does not.

Where building your own still wins

Four cases, and they are real:

  • A size outside the range carried. Widths run to 72" and there are ten heights from 2 1/4" to 11 1/4". Outside that, build it.
  • A species the client specified for a visible interior. Walnut or rift oak drawer interiors are a design decision, not a component order.
  • One replacement box. Freight on a single box never makes sense, and you can match an existing finish better than anyone sending you one.
  • A sink base or an appliance cut-out needing a notch around plumbing nobody can specify from a list. Measure it in the room and make it there.

Ship window

Drawer boxes ship in 10 business days unfinished. Blind shipping is available on any order — ask for it in the order notes.

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