How to Design Beautiful Joinery with Inset Drawers in CABINET VISION

Hi, welcome to a CABINET VISION video tutorial. My name is Tayla, and today we’re going to be looking at how to use inset drawers to create really beautiful joinery. I’ve got a couple of examples that we’re going to be using today to show how to use these insets, why they’re beneficial, and how to edit them to get the look that you’re going for.

So you can see I’ve got a couple of bar units here, one that probably looks a bit better than the other. This one is using those inset drawers. So, the pros of this is it gives us the finished drawer front but keeps it in line with the carcass that they’re attached to, rather than sitting out the front, so that we can have a beautiful open unit. This one over here, we’ve just used inner roll out drawers instead of using the inset exterior drawers, and you see it still works. They have drawers there, but it doesn’t look as neat and tidy. So, let’s jump into CABINET VISION and I’m going to show you how to create this look.

So, I’ve got both side by side in here. So what we’re going to do is edit the one on the right here and make it look like the one on the left. So let’s go to the Elevation and first thing I’m going to do is just get rid of those inner roll outs. So I’m going to go Section and Interior, and get rid of them just by clicking on each and deleting…those three. So all my sections up the top of that shelving stays in place, but now what I need to do is move over to Section Face, and I need to add some drawers to the face. So first thing I’m going to do is a horizontal split to get my two main areas: the drawers at the bottom, and the open section at the top. So at the top, I’m going to go over and make that open. And then we’re going to adjust the height so that the bottom section is just sitting underneath this bench top. So we’ve got that now. So now for that bottom section, we need to split it again into a multi split and we want to use three drawers. So, got all that set up, we hit OK, and that’s what that’s done. Let’s split it into three drawers at the front.

Now, from this point, let’s just go and have a closer look. So you can see, we’ve got three full drawers, but they’re sitting out the front of the unit. Which would be great if we had doors at the top, but because it’s an open unit, we want them to sit inside of it. So if we go to the end as well, you can see clearly, they’re poking out the front, which is not what we want. So if we go back to Section Face and click on a drawer, over here on the adjustments side, we can see Inset. And this value is going to tell the drawer how far to inset itself into the cupboard. And we need to allow for basically the drawer front thickness and a few extra millimeters because for me, I want it to sit back a little bit from the bench top that I’ve got in this unit. So, I’m going to go 24 mm, and then flick back to my end to see what that’s done. So I can see this top drawer is now sitting back behind the front line of the end, and if I use my measure tool, I can see that it’s sitting back just under 5 mm, which I’m happy with. So now I’m going to do the same on the bottom two. So again, Section Face, click on it, across to inset, and make those two the same amount: 24 mm and 24 mm. Go back to the end, beautiful. Now they’re all in line, and if we just check with our 3D, they’re looking great. So you can see they’re definitely inside the carcass.

But, we also want to create the same look over here with a skinnier top drawer and some gaps for finger pulls in between. So, going back in, right click go to our Section. First of all, let’s make the drawer heights the way we want them to be. So this top drawer I’m going to make a little narrower, at 160 mm, and I’m going to make these bottom two identical by right clicking and going to Equalize Height… on those so now they’re the same. So now I have that top skinnier drawer, and all I need to do is go to my Size Adjustment, go to Top, and take off 25 mm and that’s going to create that little gap for the finger pull. Same thing here, Top, minus 25 mm… and again on the third drawer. Beautiful. And now if we go to the 3D, we can see we’ve got two identical units. We’ve got really nice looking front faces using full materials. We’ve got the gap for the finger pull. Looks great!

So, let’s just double check by going to the cross-section of our elevation, so we can see how it connects to the bench top too. So, bench tops here inside the cabinet, drawers are sitting back behind the face a few millimeters, it’s all looking perfect how we want it to be. So that is how you use your inset drawers to create a look like this. I hope that’s been helpful. If you have any questions, please let us know. And we’ll see you in the next one.

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