How do you organize your (kitchen) cabinets & doors?

[Binba]

First major SketchUp project (galley kitchen), and cabinet doors are a good opportunity to put object organization concepts to the test. There at least 8 different door sizes in a kitchen, so do they all have to be unique or different components?
Are the doors the components & grouped with the handles, or the whole door assembly should be a component? And group that with the respective cabinet?
Any naming procedures you prefer?

My goal is to be able to swap and try out different materials, handles, and even door types (slab<–>shaker) with minimum effort.

[DaveR]

Lots of stuff to deal with here.

First, a question: Other than showing them on the cabinets, what do you need to get from these doors in the way of information? Are you purchasing the doors from a supplier? Or are you making the doors yourself? Do you need to create a list of doors and their dimensions or a cutlist for the parts of the doors?

[Binba]

Hi Dave,
I am giving the information to a GC that sources the doors. They will be custom or semi-custom. The #1 purpose of the SketchUp model is to help me choose materials. The #2 purpose is to help the GC. Therefore size matters, but I’m not concerned with bore holes position, individual shaker stiles & rails, etc.

[DaveR]

So then you should be able to make single piece doors that will work just fine. You can make one component and resize it as needed to make the others using the Move tool or Fredoscale. I prefer the Move tool. The native Scale tool wouldn’t be appropriate. Remember to use Make Unique so you aren’t resizing all the doors in the project.

[DaveR]

I wanted to clarify a point I made earlier. Make sure all door components have the same relative insertion point (component origin) to make swapping them easier. For example, inset doors could have their insertion point at the lower, front left corner so that you can drop the door into place using the lower left corner on the face frame as the destination. If you are going to draw the inset doors so there is a gap between the door and face frame, locate the origin over to the left and down by the width of the gap. Personally I wouldn’t leave the gap and would plane a little off the doors to suit.

If the doors are full overlay, set the origin up and to the right from the bottom corner by the amount of the overlay. Put the origin on the back of the door instead of the front so that it goes in as an overlay door. Partial overlay, place the origin in the corner where the left side and bottom rabbets meet.

If you do this properly, you can select the doors of a given size in the model and the select the replacement door in the Components window and use Replace Selected. In fact you can select all the instances of the door component in the model by right clicking on its thumbnail in the In Model Components window. Then right click on the new door thumbnail and click on Replace selected.