How to Design Kitchen Cabinets Online, Start to Cut List
Designing a kitchen in a browser works when the drawing and the parts list are the same job. You lay the room out, you set how the boxes go together once, and the parts fall out of the geometry rather than being counted by hand at the end. Here is the order to do it in, and what to have measured before you open anything.
The short version
Five steps, in this order, because each one changes the numbers in the next. Measure the room. Set your material and your construction. Lay the run out. Put the doors, drawers and hardware on. Then take the outputs. Doing it in this order is what stops you sizing the same set of fronts twice.
| Step 1 | Measure the room, including everything fixed: window, door swing, waste, range, sink, power |
|---|---|
| Step 2 | Set the material, the sheet size and how the box goes together, once, for the job |
| Step 3 | Lay the cabinets into the plan and check them in elevation |
| Step 4 | Choose fronts and hardware, and settle the overlay and the reveal |
| Step 5 | Take the parts list, the sheet layout, the labels and the quote out |
On this page
What designing online gets you
The reason to do this in a browser is not that a browser is fashionable. It is that the drawing stops being a separate artefact from the numbers.
On paper, a kitchen is a drawing and a parts list, and the parts list is a second document somebody typed while reading the first. Every change after that point has to be made twice, and the second one is the one that gets missed. When the room, the cabinets and the parts are one model, a cabinet you widen on Tuesday is a parts list that already knows and a sheet count that already moved.
The second thing is location. Work stored against an account opens on the machine you are standing at, which for most people means drawing at the kitchen table and cutting from the same job in the shop.
Step 1: measure the room
Four wall lengths and the ceiling height get you started. What decides whether the design survives contact with the room is everything else in it.
| Walls | Each wall at the floor and again near worktop height. Two different numbers means the wall leans, and something has to be scribed |
|---|---|
| Ceiling | Measured in more than one corner. Ceilings are rarely level and tall cabinets are where it shows |
| Openings | Window and door positions, sizes, and which way the door swings |
| Services | Waste and water positions, the gas or power for the range, and sockets you cannot move |
| Appliances | The real dimensions off the appliance, not the showroom category. A 600 mm slot and a 600 mm range are two different measurements |
Take them in whatever unit you think in. Working in feet and inches for the walls and millimetres for the cabinets is completely normal in a shop, and every dimension in CabDesign is switchable between millimetres, centimetres, decimal inches, fractional inches down to a sixteenth, and feet plus inches.
Step 2: set the construction once
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that pays. Before any cabinet goes into the plan, settle the decisions that every cabinet then inherits.
The material and its thickness, because 18 mm and 19 mm are two different cabinets. The sheet size you actually buy, because that is what the nesting will plan against. How the box goes together: whether the sides run to the floor or sit on the bottom, how the back is held, whether the top is a panel or a pair of stretchers. And your overlay and reveal, which decide the size of every front in the kitchen.
Set these once and the parts follow them everywhere. Set them per cabinet and you will be reconciling twelve slightly different standards by the time the run is drawn.
If you build to the 32mm system, settle that here too. The grid of holes is what lets hinges, slides and shelf pins land in a known place on every panel, and it is a decision about the whole job rather than about one box.
Step 3: lay the run out
Now put cabinets into the room. CabDesign draws the same job three ways and you will use all three: the floor plan for where things go and how much room is left to walk in, the elevation for how the front of the run reads, and the 3D view for whether it looks right.
The plan is where you catch clearances. The elevation is where you catch the things that make a kitchen look homemade: a drawer bank whose fronts do not line up with the door beside it, a filler that ended up 40 mm on one end of a run and 90 mm on the other, a wall cabinet that stops short of the tall unit next to it for no reason a visitor can see.
Standard sizes are a good starting point rather than a rule, and knowing where they came from makes it easier to leave them on purpose. Our guide to standard kitchen cabinet dimensions covers the usual heights, depths and widths and what each one is for.
Step 4: fronts and hardware
With the boxes placed, the fronts are arithmetic on the numbers you already set. The overlay decides how much of the cabinet each front covers, the reveal decides the gap you see between them, and the two are the same measurement read from opposite sides.
The hinge is what turns that arithmetic into something that can physically exist. A hinge is chosen for the overlay you picked, not the other way round, and picking the door position first and the hinge afterwards is how a run of doors ends up unable to open past each other. The Salice hinge calculator runs with nothing signed in and gives you the cup position and drilling dimensions from your door and overlay.
If the kitchen is handleless, the Gola profile is settled at this point too, because the channel takes height out of the elevation and every front in that run gets shorter by it.
Step 5: what comes out
The design is the input to everything after it. From design outputs you can print a report, print labels for the parts, print a customer quote, export the whole thing as CSV, and hand the job straight to the cut list. A shop that always wants the same columns can save that column set and reuse it.
From there the Cut List Optimizer turns the parts into sheets: an edge-to-edge cut pattern a panel saw can follow, grain held on the parts that need it, the width of the cut and the edgebanding accounted for, and your offcuts used before a new sheet is opened. What that arithmetic is doing, and how to check it, is the cut list calculator guide.
Draw the room first. Open the Designer, put your four walls in, and see the run in plan and elevation before you commit to a single size.
What to have ready
| Measurements | Walls at two heights, ceiling in two corners, every opening and every service |
|---|---|
| Appliances | The actual model dimensions, including door swings and any clearance the manufacturer asks for |
| Material | What you are building from, its thickness and the sheet size you buy |
| Construction | How your boxes go together, and your overlay and reveal |
| A screen | A desktop or a tablet. A plan and an elevation want room to work in, and roughly 768 pixels across is where the layout starts to breathe |
Both CabDesign and StackDesign are free during the open beta, with no card. The pricing page is the only place a price or a date is stated, and it carries both.
Sources & references
The measuring practice here is trade practice rather than a published standard, and the two cabinet standards below are the reason: both are performance and specification documents about the finished cabinet, and neither tells you how to survey a room. Everything said about what CabDesign does was read out of the shipped code, with the file and line for each claim in an HTML comment beside it in this page's source.
- KCMA, ANSI/KCMA A161.1 quality certification (a performance standard: what a finished cabinet has to survive)
- Architectural Woodwork Institute, manufactured wood casework standards (the specification tradition that governs the finished part)
- US Access Board, ADA accessibility guides (where clearance requirements come from when a kitchen has to meet them)
- Kerf (what the cutting tool removes, and why sheet counts depend on it)
Common questions
Can you really design kitchen cabinets online?
Yes, and the part that makes it work is that the drawing and the parts list are the same job rather than two files. You lay the room out, drop cabinets into it, set the sizes and the construction, and the parts fall out of the geometry rather than being counted by hand afterwards. CabDesign runs in a browser with nothing to install, and your work saves to your account so the machine you open it on next does not matter.
What do I need before I start?
Four wall measurements and the ceiling height get you a long way. Add the positions of anything fixed: the window, the door swing, the waste stack, the range and the sink, and where the power comes in. If you already know your material and your sheet size, put those in early, because they change part sizes and they change how many sheets the job takes.
Do I need to be a cabinetmaker to use it?
No. The room and the cabinets are drawn in plan, in elevation and in 3D, so you can see what you are making from three angles before anything is cut. Where trade knowledge is genuinely needed, such as your overlay or your reveal, the guides library explains what the number means before you pick one.
What does it cost?
Both products are free during the open beta, with no card. The pricing page carries the current terms and the dates, and it is the only place a price is stated.
What screen does it want?
A desktop or a tablet. A floor plan and an elevation want room to work in, and roughly 768 pixels across is where the layout starts to breathe.
Keep reading
A CabDesign guide. Built to help you plan and build better cabinets. Check every measurement against the room itself before you cut. Browse all guides.