How tall should the top drawer of a base cabinet be?
Between 130 and 180 mm of front. Below that the front looks mean and no longer takes a cutlery tray; above it, you lose the useful capacity of the two deep drawers underneath.
Base cabinet with drawers
Three drawers beat a door for almost everything a kitchen stores, provided they are not the same height. This model splits the front 1 : 1.4 : 1.4 — a shallow drawer at the top for cutlery, two deep ones below for pots.
- 600×820×579
- mm overall
- 25
- parts to cut
- 4
- raw sheets
- 14.2 m
- of edge banding
Materials
- Birch plywood 15 mm×15 · 2,1 m²
- HDF back 8 mm×1 · 0,4 m²
- MDF 19 mm×3 · 0,4 m²
- Melamine 19 mm×6 · 1,3 m²
Hardware
- Generic · Assembly screw 4 × 40×12
- Generic · Side-mount ball bearing slide, 45 mm×3
- Generic · Bar pull, 128 mm centres×3
On its own this cabinet uses only 21 % of the 4 sheets it consumes. That is normal, and it is why the app nests the whole job in one go: one carcass's offcuts take the small parts of the others.
The split that stores
Three equal drawers in a 720 mm carcass give three 240 mm drawers: too tall for cutlery, too short for a casserole. The first drawer wants to be shallow and the rest deep, and 1 : 1.4 : 1.4 is the ratio that lands right on this carcass height.
Those proportions are a starting point, not a rule: the generator takes any set of ratios and recomputes fronts, drawer boxes and slide holes.
The drawer box is sized on the slide
Drawer box width is not an aesthetic choice: it is the cabinet's inside width minus twice the side clearance the slide demands. A common ball-bearing slide wants 12.7 mm per side; a concealed undermount slide has an entirely different requirement.
Cabinet·CNC reads that figure from the item's own data — Blum, Hettich, Salice, Accuride or a trade reference — and resizes all four drawer sides and the bottom. Changing slide mid-project resizes every drawer in the job.
Common questions
What gap between drawer fronts?
3 mm is the usual gap between adjacent fronts and 2 mm around the perimeter. You need enough to absorb the slide's vertical adjustment without seeing into the carcass. The generator applies the same gap throughout and subtracts it from the available height before splitting the fronts.
Open this template and change its sizes
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