How to Add Glass to Cabinet Doors

Honeybear Lane
by Honeybear Lane
2 Days
Medium
I got a new tool–one I’ve had my eye on for years! It’s a router. I got the Dewalt Router with the plunge base. Then as I was watching a YouTube video on how to use it and with a little playing around with it, I realized I needed a router table to really make use of it. So I purchased the Ryobi router table from Home Depot. It took some fiddling around with it to get this table to work with the router but we made it work finally.
Routers are great little tools and I’m still really inexperienced with it.  But one project I wanted to use a router for was putting glass in my high upper cabinet doors.  Here’s the before:
And the after…
I actually love that before picture, haha!  But the glass doors make the kitchen feel taller and more open.  Plus it’s so much easier now to know what is in the cabinet!  But the best part is that we put lighting in the cabinets so they add some great light and glow to the kitchen…and I’ll share that in a post soon!


Back to the DIY project–how to add glass to cabinet doors!


I had purchased a couple of As Is doors from IKEA to practice on.  So once I practiced using the straight bit I was able to cut out a rabbet which allowed the center panel to come out from the door.
After a little practice, I took down all my top upper cabinet doors (labeling them all) and routered out the center panels.  It was fun!  I discovered that I felt better when I didn’t have the router go all the way to the center panel because routers get a little stressed removing too much wood at a time.  So I routered down to a very thin layer of wood, then I tapped the center panel out with a mallet and used a chisel to remove any extra wood.  
Honeybear Lane
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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