After a decade, I've come to think dovetails are overkill for most drawers

Honestly, I had a lightbulb moment during a tight deadline last month. Tbh, dovetails eat up so much time for what clients often don't care about. Ngl, we've been using locked rabbet joints on utility cabinets for years now. For example, on a mudroom unit I just finished, those drawers are rock solid and slide perfect. Most guys in the shop think I'm cutting corners, but the build is still sturdy. I'd rather spend that extra time on fitting or finish details. So yeah, I save hours and the job still looks pro.

3 comments

3 Comments

rubyreed1mo ago

Watched a buddy build a whole bookshelf with box joints last summer. He spent days on them, and yeah, they look neat, but the shelves are mostly hidden by books. Ngl, I told him to just use dados, but he was set on doing it 'the right way'. Now when you see it, you can't even tell what joints he used with all the stuff on the shelves. Honestly, it's like dovetails in drawers, if no one sees it, why kill yourself over it. Sometimes I wonder if we do these things more for our own pride than for the actual build.

victor_barnes481mo ago

Totally get what @rubyreed means, see this everywhere. People will over-complicate the simplest things just to say they did it the hard way. It's like a weird flex even when nobody's ever gonna see it lol.

the_michael24d agoTop Commenter

Oh man, this hits home. I was just reading this article about "invisible design" and it basically said the same thing @victor_barnes48 is getting at. It talked about how a lot of effort gets put into parts of a project that literally no one will ever notice or care about. I mean, sure, doing things well feels good, but there's a line. Sometimes it feels like people are just trying to prove something to themselves, you know? Like they need that private win even if it makes the whole job take three times as long.