How to make a cut list from a kitchen design (step by step)

A kitchen elevation drawing tells the client and the fitter what the kitchen will look like. It does not tell the saw operator what to cut. Between those two documents sits the cut list — the translation step where cabinet outside dimensions become individual panel sizes with the case construction, thickness deductions, and banding allowances already worked out. Get this translation wrong and you either discover the error at the CNC (expensive) or, worse, after assembly (very expensive).

From elevation and plan to part list

Start from the plan view for cabinet widths and the elevation for heights, and reconcile both against the section drawing if one exists — sections are where toe-kick height, worktop thickness, and cornice detail actually live, and elevations often just show them symbolically. Work cabinet by cabinet, not run by run: a continuous run of three base units still needs three separate carcasses (or a mix of separate and shared-side carcasses, if you butt them and skip a shared panel) because each one becomes its own set of parts on the list.

For each cabinet, record its box type (base, wall, tall, corner), its finished exterior dimensions (width x height x depth), and its carcass style: 32 mm system with two loose sides, framed with a solid face frame, or a hybrid. This single piece of information — carcass style — determines almost every deduction that follows, so get it settled before you touch a spreadsheet.

• List every cabinet as a row: location, type, external W x H x D, carcass style, door count, drawer count.
• Note any non-standard depth or height (corner units, fridge housings, above-hood units) separately — they are the ones that get missed.
• Confirm worktop thickness and toe-kick height before calculating carcass heights, since both eat into the cabinet's usable internal height.
• Mark which cabinets share a side panel with a neighbour, since that changes the part count for both.

Thickness deductions: sides, shelves, backs

This is where most first cut lists go wrong. A cabinet's external dimensions are not its panel dimensions — every panel that closes against another one loses material equal to the thickness of what it butts against. The rule of thumb for a basic 18 mm melamine-faced carcase with a bottom set between the sides and a back rebated in:

Two details cause most of the real-world errors here. First, whether the bottom sits between the sides or the sides sit on top of the bottom flips which part gets the deduction — decide construction direction before calculating, and be consistent across the whole run. Second, back panels are either rebated into a groove (subtract twice the rebate depth, add it back to width) or simply screwed on flush to the rear edge (no deduction, back equals full carcass width and height minus a few millimetres clearance) — these give different numbers and mixing the two conventions inside one job is a common source of a back panel that is 12 mm out.

Toe-kick, face frames, edge banding allowance

The toe-kick (plinth) recess is rarely a cut panel on the carcass itself — it is usually a separate plinth board cut to the total run length and a fixed height (typically 100-150 mm, confirm against the leg or plinth-clip system spec), fitted after the carcasses are set. What matters for the cut list is that carcass height is worktop height minus toe-kick height minus worktop thickness minus any levelling allowance, not the finished cabinet-front height read off the elevation. A 900 mm worktop height with a 150 mm kick and 38 mm worktop leaves 712 mm of carcass height before internal deductions — get this backwards and every base cabinet on the job is short.

Face frames, if used, are cut as separate solid-timber rails and stiles rather than as a panel deduction, and the carcass itself is sized to the frame's rebate rather than to the finished opening — measure the actual rebate on your face-frame joinery method rather than assuming a stock allowance, since it varies by whether you use pocket screws, dowels, or a cope-and-stick cutter set.

Edge banding allowance is a cutting-size issue, not a finished-size issue: if your panel saw or CNC trims to net size before banding, cut every exposed edge at final size and band after; if you band oversized strips and trim flush afterward (common on manual edgebanders), add 1-2 mm per banded edge to the cutting list and let the trimmer remove it, but do not add this allowance twice by also padding it into the optimizer's kerf setting. Decide the workflow once per job and apply it identically to every part, or the shelves in one cabinet will be visibly different sizes from the shelves in the next.

Grouping by material and thickness

A kitchen cut list mixes materials that must never nest together: 18 mm carcass melamine, 18 mm door-blank MDF (if doors are shop-made), 3 mm or 6 mm back panel ply, and sometimes a 25 mm panel for exposed end panels or a shelf that needs extra stiffness over a long span. Before sending anything to the optimizer, group every part by material and thickness as a first-class field, not a note in a comments column — this is the field the optimizer will nest by, and if two different 18 mm materials are typed identically it will happily mix white melamine parts onto a grey melamine sheet.

Grain and pattern direction is part of the grouping too, not a separate step: any part cut from a woodgrain-effect melamine needs a locked grain direction flag before it goes anywhere near a nesting algorithm, or you will get technically-efficient layouts with half the doors running sideways. See grain matching on sheet goods for how to flag this correctly.

Handing the list to the optimizer

Once every part has a name, a material/thickness group, a grain flag, and a finished cutting size (post-deduction, pre- or post-banding per your convention above), the list is ready to become sheet layouts. Enter your actual sheet sizes and any offcuts you already have on the rack as separate stock entries, set kerf to your actual blade or CNC bit width, and run one optimization per material group rather than lumping everything into a single job — a mixed job either forces the optimizer to solve for the wrong sheet size or silently drops parts that don't match any entered stock. This is exactly the workflow the free cut list optimizer is built around: paste in your grouped parts, confirm sheet size and kerf per group, and get a labelled layout back per sheet.

1. Export or type the part list with name, quantity, length, width, thickness, material group, and grain flag.
2. Split into one job per material/thickness group.
3. Set sheet size, kerf, and grain-lock per job in the optimizer.
4. Review the layout for any part flagged as 'doesn't fit any sheet' before cutting — this catches oversized shelves and mis-measured corner units early.
5. Print labelled sheet diagrams and cross-check total sheet count against your material order before cutting day.

Common mistakes that waste a full sheet

Almost every wasted sheet on a kitchen job traces back to one of a small number of repeat mistakes, and all of them are cheaper to catch on the list than on the saw.

• Using external cabinet dimensions as panel dimensions and forgetting the thickness deduction on bottoms and fixed shelves — the single most common error, and it is invisible until dry-fit.
• Calculating carcass height from the elevation's finished-front height instead of worktop height minus toe-kick minus worktop thickness, producing carcasses that are systematically too tall or too short across the whole kitchen.
• Mixing back-panel conventions (rebated vs. flush-screwed) within one job, so half the backs are wrong by the rebate depth.
• Typing two visually similar but different SKUs of 18 mm melamine as one material group, so the optimizer nests white and grey parts onto the same sheet.
• Forgetting grain-direction locking on a woodgrain finish, discovered only when the doors are hung and half of them run the wrong way.
• Not accounting for a shared side panel between adjacent cabinets, which either doubles a panel unnecessarily or leaves a cabinet with no side at all if the sharing was assumed but not built into the joinery.
• Sending one giant mixed-material job to the optimizer instead of one job per group, which produces layouts that look efficient on paper but don't correspond to any sheet you can actually buy.

None of these mistakes are about the optimizer's math — they are about the data that goes in. A cut list built carefully from the elevation, with deductions and groupings settled before anything reaches the software, turns kitchen cabinetry from a source of dry-fit surprises into a predictable, repeatable production run. For the layout stage itself, see cutting optimization, and try the cut list optimizer on your next job's part list before you touch a sheet.