Veneer kitchen cabinets

OK, you're all ready to reveneer your kitchen cabinets. If you've heard of the procedure for reveneering with contact cement and all the trimmings and have shied away from doing any veneer work, block it all from your mind, because this procedure is as different as sawing boards and nailing boards comparing flexible and raw veneer applications. See veneer information for more about veneer.

Cabinet Doors and Drawers

Veneer and more Wood Products

Easy to Use

The veneer is very easy to use. It has a paper backing that makes the very thin wood a lot stronger while you're working with it than raw veneer is. If you're very careful while cutting the veneer for size and get the edges perfectly straight, you can join two or more leftover pieces together to cover a wider area. Look closely at your old kitchen cabinet doors to see where there may be joined pieces and how they handled grain patterns. Kitchen cabinet ends are another good place to check.

Check For Fit

Check the veneer pieces against each other to be sure that they fit snugly together and that the veneer pattern of each piece look good together. If one piece has large graceful swirls and another piece has many tight turns they won't go together too well, so keep shifting pieces until you have good matches.

Measure Kitchen Cabinets Carefully

Notice that the veneer that we recommend comes in two sizes, 24 inch by 24 inch and 24 inch by 96 inch.

If you measure carefully and plan your job well you can come out with a minimum of wasted material, which is wasted money. A good way to plan is with graph paper and draw diagrams of all the pieces of your cupboards, doors, kitchen cabinet ends, up and down pieces that the door hinges attach to, up and down pieces between the doors, back and forth pieces at the tops and bottoms of the doors (and drawers), drawer fronts and any other parts that I missed listing.

Write the dimensions on your diagrams and draw arrows to indicate the direction of the grain pattern.

Allow at least 1/4 inch extra in each direction, because it's very difficult to cut a piece of veneer the exact size of a kitchen cabinet door and lay it exactly without a thin strip being missed along one edge.

Check Kitchen Cabinets for Square

Each dimension should be checked for square. A door that appears perfectly square can be off by a little, which adds up to a lot.

If you don't have a square, measure from the upper left corner diagonally down to the lower right hand corner and from the upper right hand corner diagonally down to the lower left hand corner. If the dimensions are different the piece isn't square. For example a door may measure the same on both sides and the same on the top and bottom, but cut at a slight angle on the top and bottom, so that one side is slightly higher than the other, say the right side is 1/8 inch higher than the left side. If both sides are equal length and you cut a piece of veneer exactly as long as the sides and made it's corners squared you would end up with 1/8 inch of old kitchen cabinet surface uncovered at the top and 1/8 inch overlap at the bottom, so be sure to allow extra stock for working. You won't notice the difference in appearance with a stand alone door, but you need to make allowances for fitting the veneer properly on the door.

Cut The Veneer Pieces

Lay the veneer out and plan how grain patterns will look together, but when it comes time to cut the veneer, do one piece at a time. Production line worked good for Ford Model T's, but if you're going to make a mistake with a measurement or cut, just make mistakes one at a time and not on a whole bunch of pieces at once, it can get expensive and one or two mistakes can generally be used elsewhere.

Always start with the largest piece first, then if you do make a mistake you can definitely use the veneer on a smaller piece.

Now with that aside, we know you aren't going to make any mistakes, so we can proceed to the Next Page of applying veneer to your kitchen cabinets or you can go to Kitchen Cabinet Refacing Menu to review some of the other subjects.

Apply kitchen cabinet refacing veneer page 1

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