How a cabinet is built: every part, and what each one is for
A cabinet is a small number of flat boards and a handful of metal parts, and most decisions in furniture-making come down to which of those boards you can leave out. This page is the map: what each part is called, what job it does, and where to read the detail. It also covers the thing most guides skip, which is the parts that look structural, turn up in plenty of cabinets, and do nothing.
A cabinet is a carcass (two sides, a bottom, a top or a pair of rails, and a back) with fronts hung on it and hardware making those fronts move. Everything else fits inside or underneath: shelves, partitions, the toe kick, the drawer boxes. The carcass decides whether it lasts, the hardware decides how it feels, the fronts decide what it looks like. Those three barely touch each other, which is how a beautiful cabinet can be badly built and a plain one can outlive the house.
The parts, named
Trade names vary by country and by shop. A side is a gable to a European joiner and an end to an American one. Both are the same board.
Part
Also called
What it does
Sides
Gables, ends
The two vertical panels that carry everything. Shelves, drawer runners and hinge plates all fix to them, which is why they are drilled on a 32 mm grid What they are made of →
Bottom
Deck, floor
The load-bearing panel between the sides. In a base cabinet it is what everything inside stands on
Top, or stretchers
Top rails, top braces
A full panel on a wall or tall cabinet. On a base cabinet, usually two narrow boards instead, since a countertop is going on top of it anyway
Back
Back panel
The part that stops the box racking. Full thickness, thin sheet in a groove, thin sheet applied, or a pair of rails with nothing between them Which back to build →
Partitions
Dividers, mullions
Vertical panels splitting the interior. Necessary where something mounts to them, and a mistake where nothing does
Shelves
·
Fixed or adjustable on pins in the 32 mm holes. A shelf carries load; a shelf that carries nothing is a part in the cut list doing nothing
Rails
Stretchers, drawer rails
Narrow boards spanning between the sides where a full panel is not wanted: under a drawer over a door, at a sink, across the back
Toe kick
Plinth, kick panel
The recessed strip at the floor that your feet go under, and the legs or frame that hold the box at its height How a cabinet meets the floor →
Fronts
Doors, drawer fronts, facades
Everything you see and touch. Sized from the opening plus or minus the reveal, depending on whether they sit on the box or in it Inset vs overlay →
Edge banding
Edging, tape
The strip that covers a cut edge of board. Cosmetic on the inside, and the difference between a sealed edge and a swollen one where water gets to it Edge banding →
Hardware
Hinges, runners, connectors, handles
The moving parts and the joints. This decides how a finished cabinet feels in daily use, far more than the box does Hinges →
The carcass: five boards and a decision about each
Take a base cabinet apart and you have two sides, a bottom, something across the top, and a back. Only two of those five are obvious.
The sides do the work. Everything that carries load fixes to them: shelf pins, drawer runners, hinge plates. That is why they are drilled on a regular 32 mm grid, one hole pattern that every piece of European hardware is designed to land on, and it is what lets you rearrange a cabinet years later. The same grid is why our hinge plates and drawer runners can be moved without new holes.
The top is often not a panel at all. A wall cabinet has a solid top, since it is the underside of nothing and the top of something you can see. A base cabinet usually does not: a countertop is going straight onto it, so two narrow boards across the front and back hold the sides apart and the worktop takes care of the rest. If you have ever wondered why a base unit seems to be missing its lid, that is the reason. The stretchers are the correct part for that position, not a saving.
The back is structural even when it is thin. Its job is to stop the box folding sideways, and there are five reasonable ways to build one, from an 18 mm board down to no sheet at all and a pair of rails. The back panel has its own guide, because the choice changes how the cabinet hangs on a wall.
What holds it together is a separate question from what it is made of. Ours assemble with connectors driven from the face of a panel rather than into its edge, which is what lets a flat-packed cabinet go together with a hex key and come apart again without wrecking the board.
The parts that should not be there
Read this section even if you know the rest. A great deal of what looks like solid construction is a part inherited from a different way of building, doing nothing where it now sits.
There is nothing between stacked drawers. No shelf, no rail, no panel. The drawers hang off runners screwed to the sides, and the space between them is air. People find this alarming, so here is the evidence rather than the assertion:
IKEA sells its four-drawer base and its plain door base as the same carcass part number. The box does not change when the drawers do.
A six-drawer MALM chest has sides, a bottom, a top and a back, with no cross-members at all.
Blum's tall drawer towers carry up to 70 kg in one stack without an intermediate rail anywhere.
ANSI/KCMA A161.1 rates a cabinet without a drawer rail, testing it to 200 lb rather than 250. The standard permits the absence and lowers the bar.
The rail does belong under a drawer that sits above a door. There it ties the sides together and gives the door something to close against. Ours is 5" (127 mm) deep. At a sink it shrinks to 3" (76 mm), the narrowest board that will not rotate on its fixings, and the bowl passes behind it.
Shelves that carry nothing tell the same story. When we audited our own kitchen line, full-depth shelves went from twenty-one to eight, and every one of the eight holds something up: the floor an oven stands on, the mid-shelf of a pantry. The other thirteen were parts in a cut list, weight in a box and money on an invoice.
The rule underneath all of it: a part earns its place by carrying something or by holding something apart. If it does neither, you are paying for reassurance.
What goes underneath
A cabinet does not sit on the floor. It stands on something, and that something absorbs the unevenness of the room. Adjustable legs with a clip-on kick panel are the usual answer; a separate plinth frame, or gables running to the floor, are the alternatives. Each has real consequences for levelling, for water and for how the front reads, and the full comparison is here.
One number to carry away: the toe kick is recessed about 40 mm (1½")in our cabinets, and 3" in the American convention. That recess is where your toes go when you stand at a counter. Without it you stand an inch and a half further back, all day.
What goes on the front
Fronts are a separate build from the box, which is why you can change one without the other. Three decisions live here, and people confuse them with each other constantly:
How the front sits on the box, over the edges or inside the opening. Inset vs overlay.
Whether the box has a frame across its front at all. Frameless vs face-frame, a construction difference rather than a styling one.
What the front looks like, flat, shaker or milled. Door styles.
Behind a drawer front there is a whole second box, built and sized to its own rules: drawer box construction.
How big any of it should be
Anatomy answers what the parts are. The dimensions cluster answers how large. Three worth reading before you plan anything:
The standard dimension grid, every height, depth and width, and why the numbers follow from each other rather than being a list to memorise.
Depth, why base cabinets are twice as deep as wall cabinets and when to break that.
Every cabinet you draw resolves into an actual list of boards, each with its size, its edge banding and its drilling. Change the back from a panel to a pair of rails, or drop a shelf that was carrying nothing, and watch the list get shorter and the price follow it down.
The box is the carcass, made of two sides (also called gables or ends), a bottom, a top or a pair of stretchers across the top, and a back. Inside it go shelves and sometimes partitions. Underneath is the toe kick, the recessed strip at floor level, with legs or a plinth holding the box at its height. On the front are the doors and drawer fronts, collectively the fronts or facades. Holding it together and making it move is the hardware: hinges, drawer runners, connectors and handles. Edge banding covers the cut edges of the boards.
What is a cabinet carcass?
The box itself, without the doors, drawer fronts or handles: sides, bottom, top or top rails, and back. It determines whether the cabinet stays square and lasts, and it is largely independent of what the cabinet looks like, since the same carcass can take flat fronts or shaker fronts, cheap hinges or good ones. That independence is why fronts can be replaced years later without rebuilding anything, and why judging a cabinet by its doors tells you very little.
Why do base cabinets have no top panel?
Because a countertop is going straight onto them. A pair of narrow boards across the front and back, called stretchers, holds the sides the right distance apart and gives the worktop something to fix to, and a full panel underneath it would be a whole sheet of board doing nothing. Wall cabinets do have solid tops, since there is nothing above them but air. This is not a cost saving; the stretchers are the correct part for that position.
Do drawers need a rail or shelf between them?
No. Drawers hang from runners screwed to the cabinet sides, and the space between stacked drawers is air. The evidence is easy to check: IKEA sells its four-drawer base and its plain door base as the same carcass part number, a six-drawer MALM chest has no cross-members at all, and Blum's tall drawer towers carry up to 70 kg in one stack with nothing between the drawers. The ANSI/KCMA standard rates a carcass without a drawer rail explicitly, testing it to 200 lb rather than 250. A rail does belong under a drawer that sits above a door, where it ties the sides together and gives the door something to close against.
What is a stretcher in cabinet making?
A narrow board spanning between the two sides where a full panel is not wanted. The common places are across the top of a base cabinet under the countertop, under a drawer that sits above a door, and across the back of an open-backed cabinet as a hanging rail. About 100 mm (4 inches) is the ordinary board for the job. A stretcher holds the sides apart and stops the box distorting, the same work a panel does, using a tenth of the material, in positions where nothing needs to rest on it.
What is the difference between a gable and a partition?
Position, mostly. A gable is one of the two outside vertical panels of a cabinet; a partition is a vertical panel inside it, splitting the interior into bays. The practical difference is what they carry. A gable always carries something, since every shelf pin, hinge plate and drawer runner fixes to it, whereas a partition only earns its place if something mounts to it or rests on it. A partition between two side-by-side drawers is real structure. A partition that divides space nothing needs divided is a part in the cut list and weight in the box.
How are cabinet panels joined together?
In modern flat-pack construction, with connectors rather than glue and nails, which is what lets a cabinet ship flat and go together with a hex key. Ours use connectors driven from the face of a panel instead of into its edge. That matters for two reasons: board holds a fixing much better through its face than into the fragile edge of a sheet, and a face-fixed connector can be undone and redone without ruining the panel. Traditional methods, dowels, cam locks, dados and dovetails, all still exist and all still work; they differ mainly in how well they survive being taken apart.
