We Built a Cabinet From Blueprint's Cut List — Here's What We Learned
Every cabinet design app says its numbers are accurate. We wanted to actually check ours, so we took a real cabinet run — designed entirely in Blueprint, our cabinet design and cut list software, cut list and all — and built it. No shortcuts, no rounding up "close enough," no fixing anything by hand mid-build. Whatever the app said, that's what got cut.
Here's what that looked like, and the one thing it taught us about our own cut list.
The Plan
The run itself is a wall of storage — tall cabinets, wall cabinets, and base cabinets side by side, not a kitchen this time, but the same cabinet engine either way. Every opening was split, shelved, and doored the same way you'd do it for any cabinet in Blueprint: pick a leaf opening, split it, add a door or a drawer stack, set the gaps, done.
These aren't slim units. Each cabinet is 1250mm wide with three doors, 600mm deep and around 1200mm tall, and inside it's divided into two volumes — one of them double width, behind two doors. They're built to carry books, so they're built stiff: 18mm particle board for the sides, and 25mm shelves in the double volume, where the spans run to around 880mm.
When the design was finished, we exported the PDF cut list the normal way — Exports menu, select the cabinets, print. That PDF is what went to the workshop. Nothing was re-measured or adjusted before cutting.
The Build
We ordered the panels cut and banded to size straight from the exported cut list. They came back as flat panels, ready to be drilled and assembled — the drilling we did ourselves, dowel holes and minifix housings, before putting each cabinet together. Assembly was standard dowel-and-minifix construction, same as any flat-pack cabinet.
Panel by panel, the dimensions matched. Widths, heights, edge banding on every side — everything the shop cut lined up with what the cut list said it should be, which is really the entire point of the exercise. A cut list you can't trust panel-for-panel isn't a cut list, it's a suggestion.
Inside the Cabinet
Shelves are part of the cut list like every other panel — each one cut to the size set in the opening tree. The double volume, behind two doors, has shelf spans of around 880mm, so those shelves are 25mm board to carry the weight of books. Where the shelf pins and hinges go isn't something the cut list specifies, so we measured, marked and drilled those ourselves.
The Result
Doors on, hardware on, standing in the room it was designed for.
What We Caught
Nothing was wrong with the dimensions — that was the part we cared about most, and it held up. But building a real cabinet from a real cut list is also the best way to find the difference between "the numbers are right" and "the drawing tells you everything you need," and it turned up one thing:
Plinth mounting wasn't marked on the panel schematic. The bottom board sits raised above the plinth face by the plinth height, but the side panel drawing didn't show where that bottom board should be mounted, so we measured it by hand for this build. We've since fixed it: from Blueprint 1.11, the schematic marks the plinth mounting position.
It wasn't a cut-list accuracy problem — every dimension we checked against the real panels was correct. It was a documentation gap: a place where the PDF assumed shop knowledge instead of showing it. That's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to miss until you're standing at a workbench with a real panel in your hands, which is the whole reason we did this instead of just trusting the render.
New to Blueprint? Read the complete guide to Blueprint, see everything it does on the Blueprint cabinet design software page, or get the app and try it yourself.