There are two major cabinet construction styles…Face Frame and Euro. How do you tell which style you have? Go to a double door cabinet and open both doors. If there is a vertical bar between the doors, you have Face Frame…no vertical bar, you have Euro cabinets.

The implications? With Euro cabinets, you can install a single large drawer…the width of the full double shelf. With face Frame, you are restricted to narrower drawers…roughly the width of a single door…with one caveat. You can cut out the vertical post…thus giving you a double wide shelf…but this is best left to professionals. Translation…higher costs to you to convert…but doable.

Cabinet makers typically make standard sized cabinet modules…and then piece a series of modules together on the jobsite to fit a given length wall. Standard cabinet modules come in 3″ (outside dimension) increments from 12″ to 48″. The standard depth for kitchen cabinets is 24″…for bathroom vanities 20″. So, to maximize the usable shelf space in your cabinets, the drawer depth should be just slightly less the cabinet depth.

A third cabinet situation is that of custom cabinets. They can be either Face Frame or Euro, but not standard depth or width. This is often the situation with islands and pantries. To get a tight drawer fit with custom cabinets requires buying custom drawers…which again implies higher costs. Caution…If you give the manufacturer the drawer measurements…and you make a mistake…you own it.

Just some examples of how your cabinet style can impact the selection of sliding shelves when retrofitting your cabinets.