The drawer boxes were easy to build. I made them from 12 mm Baltic birch plywood. I prefinished the insides with poly, glued them up (using dowel joinery, like the rest of the project), and then finished the outsides.

Next, I drilled the screw holes for the drawer pulls. The pulls are very thin at the edges, so the holes for the mounting screws had to be as small as possible and positioned precisely.

I really like how they look, so they were worth the effort.

Mounting the fronts to the drawer boxes was one of those five-minute jobs that ended up taking an hour.

The main problem was that the mounting screws that came with the pulls were long enough to use with the 3/4” thick drawer fronts, but too short for the combined thickness (about 1-1/ 4”) of the fronts and drawer boxes. I have a ton of breakaway screws leftover from a kitchen remodel, but they didn’t work either. No matter where I broke them, they were either too short or too long.

I didn’t feel like searching for screws that were the perfect length, so I decided to use the original screws and attach the pulls directly to the drawer fronts. That meant I had to drill 3/8” diameter clearance holes in the drawer box. The screw heads fit inside the holes (so the drawer front can lay flat against the drawer box), and I can tighten (or remove) the pulls from inside the drawers without removing the fronts.

That worked well for the tall drawer.

That wasn’t the case for the short drawer. (I hadn’t modeled the pull holes in SketchUp, and I often encounter “fun” surprises when I skip a modeling step. This time was no exception.) I hadn’t anticipated the top pull holes lining up with top of the drawer box. Even if the pull screws had been long enough to accommodate both the drawer front and drawer box, I couldn’t have used them. There was no drawer box there.

I had two options. First, I could trim off 1/8” or so off the top of the drawer box so the screw heads cleared the top. (If I had modeled everything up front, I would have reduced the drawer box height.) Second, I could make little clearance troughs for the screw heads. I opted for the latter. I could have used my router table to make the troughs, but I didn’t feel like setting it up. Instead, I clamped a scrap to the drawer box and used a 3/8” Forstner bit in my drill press.

I brushed some poly over the troughs, and all was well. (The alignment is slightly off in the photo below because I hadn’t adjusted the drawer front’s position yet.) As you can see from the photo, I got lucky with the position of the bottom pull holes. If the pulls had been a few millimeters longer, the bottom screws would have intersected the drawer bottom, and that would have been a bigger problem.