How to Create a Cut List for Kitchen Cabinets

A kitchen cabinet cut list is a complete inventory of every panel you need to cut for a run of cabinets: sides, tops, bottoms, shelves, backs, drawer boxes, and door fronts, each with an exact width, height, material, and quantity. Build the list accurately before you touch the saw and you will typically trim 15 to 25% off your material bill and avoid the most expensive mistakes in cabinetmaking: mismeasured panels and forgotten parts. The workflow never changes, whether you are building one sink base or a full 15-cabinet kitchen: measure the room, plan the layout, list every part with its correct deductions, optimize the sheet layout, then export labelled cut sheets to the workshop. This guide walks all five steps and finishes with a fully worked example for a real galley kitchen so you can see the numbers end to end.

Anatomy of a Kitchen Cabinet

Before you can list parts, you need to know what a cabinet is made of. Base, wall, and tall units all share the same skeleton, and only the dimensions change.

A standard frameless (European-style) base cabinet carcass is made up of:

• Two side panels (gables): the vertical walls of the box, cut from 18mm carcass material. In a frameless box the sides are the outermost panels, so they run the full depth and everything else fits between them.
• Top rails or a full top: two 100mm stretchers on a base unit (so a worktop can sit over it), or a full panel on a wall unit.
• Bottom panel: the floor of the box, captured between the sides.
• Back panel: thinner 6mm or 12mm stock, set into a rebate or nailed to the rear edges to square the box.
• Shelves: fixed or adjustable, cut 2 to 3mm shy of the internal width so they drop in cleanly.
• Face frame (optional): a solid-wood frame across the front, standard on American-style cabinets and absent on frameless boxes.

Drawer boxes add five parts each: two sides, a front, a back, and a bottom. It is easy to undercount these, so multiply deliberately: a three-drawer base adds 15 parts on top of the carcass, a four-drawer bank adds 20.

Door and drawer fronts are cut separately, usually from the same sheet stock for a slab look, or from MDF when they will be sprayed. Because MDF has no grain and takes paint beautifully, many makers run carcasses in birch or melamine ply and fronts in MDF. See our plywood cut list guide for how material choice changes your yield.

Group your list by material and thickness from the start. A typical kitchen produces three groups: 18mm carcass ply, 6mm hardboard backs, and 18mm MDF fronts. Each group is optimized against its own stock sheet, so mixing them in one run gives unusable results.

Step 1: Measure Your Kitchen

Accurate measurements are the foundation of the whole list. A 5mm error on a wall length can push a run of cabinets past a window or leave a gap you cannot close cleanly. Measure:

• Wall lengths at three heights (floor, mid-wall, ceiling) and use the shortest reading. Walls are rarely square or plumb.
• Ceiling height, which caps your tall units and sets the gap between base and wall cabinets.
• Obstacles: windows, pipes, sockets, radiators, and any structural column. Mark their exact positions on your sketch.
• Appliance openings: a dishwasher needs roughly 600mm, and ovens, fridges, and cooktops each have their own clearance in the manufacturer sheet. Design the gaps, do not guess them.

Standard carcass dimensions give you a reliable starting point. The table below reflects common metric kitchen sizing; adjust for your own worktop and appliances.

Leave a 2 to 3mm gap between adjacent cabinets and at the wall for scribe and adjustment. It looks trivial, but skip it across a run of ten cabinets and you accumulate 20 to 30mm of error, which is often enough to stop the last unit fitting.

Step 2: Plan Your Cabinet Layout

With the room measured, sketch it to scale and assign a cabinet to each position. Number every unit (B1, B2, W1 and so on), because those numbers become the labels that keep 200 near-identical rectangles organized on the workshop floor. A typical L-shaped kitchen runs 12 to 16 base cabinets, 8 to 12 wall units, and 1 or 2 tall cabinets, producing 150 to 250 individual parts once you count backs, shelves, drawers, and fronts.

Decide your construction method now, because it drives every deduction in the next step. The two common choices are a rebated back (back panel sits in a groove, so the sides run full depth) or a captured back (back sits between the sides). Whichever you pick, apply it to every cabinet identically.

Step 3: List Every Part

Now work cabinet by cabinet and write down every component with its finished width and height. The critical skill here is the deduction: an overall cabinet width is not the width of the panels inside it. For a frameless 600mm base, 560mm deep and 720mm high, with 18mm sides and a captured bottom, the parts in 18mm ply are:

• 2x Side panel: 560 x 720mm (full carcass depth by carcass height, since the sides are the outer walls)
• 1x Bottom panel: 564 x 560mm (564 = 600 - 2 x 18, the width between the sides)
• 2x Top rail: 564 x 100mm
• 1x Shelf: 562 x 540mm (2mm under the internal width so it drops in, held back from the front and rear)

And in 6mm hardboard:

• 1x Back panel: 598 x 718mm (sized to sit in the rebate, a couple of mm under the outside dimensions)

The single most common cut-list error is mixing internal and overall dimensions, so pick one reference (I use overall/outside) and derive every internal part from it with the same arithmetic. We cover this and the other frequent slip-ups in depth in the most common cut list mistakes.

Do not forget the parts that live outside the carcass:

• Filler strips: 50 to 100mm wide, to close the gap at a wall or between cabinets.
• End panels: decorative skins over an exposed gable, often in the door material.
• Plinths (kick boards): 150mm high across the run, often reclaimed from offcuts.
• Cornice and pelmet: if your design uses them.
• Drawer boxes: five parts each, the most under-counted item on any list.

A Worked Example: A 9-Cabinet Galley Kitchen

To make this concrete, here is a full run I planned recently: a galley kitchen with five base units, three wall units, and one tall pantry, built frameless in 18mm birch ply with 6mm hardboard backs and 18mm MDF slab fronts. This is the level of detail your own list should reach before you optimize.

Counting it all out, this kitchen came to 51 carcass panels, 9 hardboard backs, and 13 MDF fronts, plus 15 drawer-box parts for the one drawer bank (cut from ply offcuts), roughly 88 pieces across three sheet-optimized material groups. Entered into an optimizer against 2440 x 1220mm sheets with a 3mm kerf and grain locked on the visible gables and fronts, the layout resolved to five sheets of 18mm birch ply at 89% utilization, two sheets of 6mm hardboard for the backs, and two sheets of 18mm MDF for the fronts. Nine sheets in total.

For contrast, my first hand-drawn layout of the same parts used seven sheets of the 18mm ply because I could not juggle the drawer parts and the pantry shelves into the gaps by eye. Two extra sheets at 70 dollars each is 140 dollars of avoidable waste on a single kitchen, and the optimizer found the better layout in under a minute. That gap is the whole reason to plan the cut before you cut.

Step 4: Optimize the Sheet Layout

Arranging 80-plus parts onto stock sheets with minimal waste is a bin-packing problem, and doing it by hand is both slow and wasteful past a dozen parts. A cut list optimizer does it in seconds. To run a kitchen through CutPlan:

1. Enter parts grouped by material and thickness, named by cabinet as above. Keep the three groups (carcass, backs, fronts) separate.
2. Set your stock sheet size. Most regions supply 2440 x 1220mm, but confirm with your merchant, since sheet sizes vary by country.
3. Set the saw kerf. A 3mm kerf is normal for a table saw and 4mm for a panel saw, so the optimizer subtracts the material each cut removes.
4. Lock grain direction on the parts that show: gables, end panels, and fronts. Leave shelves, rails, and backs free to rotate so the packer can fill the gaps.
5. Run it and read the sheet count. A tidy kitchen list lands around 85 to 92% utilization; CutPlan reports exactly how many sheets each material group needs.

Step 5: Export and Cut

Once the layout looks right, send it to the bench in the format that suits your saw:

• PDF for hand cutting on a table or panel saw: one page per sheet, every part labelled with its cabinet number and finished size.
• DXF for a CNC router or beam saw, which reads the part coordinates straight off the file.
• CSV when a merchant is cutting the sheets for you and just needs the parts list.

Cut the carcass panels first, then the backs, then the fronts, writing each part's label onto the panel the moment it comes off the saw. Keep the 18mm offcuts back for plinths and filler strips; they usually drop into the waste the packer could not fill with a full panel. Do that and a kitchen that looks like 88 identical rectangles assembles itself in the right order.

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