Woodworking Guides
Real-world cut lists you can use as-is or load straight into CutList to optimise your sheet layout. Every guide includes panel dimensions in millimetres, material specs, and a sheet count estimate.
How to Read and Create a Cut List
The complete beginner's guide
Learn what a cut list is, how to create one from scratch, and how to plan your cutting sequence. Covers rip-first vs crosscut-first, sheet handling safety, kerf, and how optimisers minimise waste.
Sheet Goods Sizes & Dimensions
Plywood, MDF, melamine & chipboard — UK, EU, US
Complete reference for standard sheet sizes by region — plywood, MDF, melamine, and chipboard. Covers thicknesses, weights, grades, grain direction, and which material to use for each part of a cabinet.
How to Reduce Sheet Goods Waste
7 optimisation strategies for plywood, MDF & melamine
Cut waste from 15% to under 8% on any sheet material. Practical strategies including cut list optimisation, kerf management, offcut tracking, grain direction trade-offs, and batching multiple projects.
Basic Kitchen Cabinets
8 cabinets from sheet goods
Complete cut list for a one-wall kitchen with 4 base units and 4 wall units. Includes every panel dimension, door sizes, and sheet count for 18 mm plywood and MDF.
Blum Space Tower Pantry Unit
Tall cabinet with internal drawers
Cut list for a 2100 mm tall pantry unit with 6 variable-height internal drawer boxes. One door, uniform exterior, flexible storage inside using Blum-compatible hardware.
Recreate an IKEA METOD Kitchen
L-shaped kitchen in plywood
Take a standard IKEA METOD kitchen layout and rebuild every cabinet from 18 mm birch plywood. Side-by-side dimension mapping, cost comparison, and full cut list.
Sheet Joinery Guide
How to connect cabinet panels
Compare pocket holes, biscuits, dowels, dominoes, and knockdown fittings. History, strength tests, costs, and honest recommendations for small shop cabinet makers.
Why use a cut list optimiser?
Every woodworking project that uses sheet goods — plywood, MDF, melamine, or chipboard — starts with the same question: how do I cut all these panels from the fewest sheets with the least waste?
Working it out by hand is slow and error-prone, especially once you have more than a dozen parts. A cut list optimiser does the maths for you: it takes your list of required panels and the stock sheet size, then finds a layout that minimises off-cuts.
The guides on this page give you ready-made cut lists for common projects. You can use the dimensions directly, or paste them into CutList to generate an optimised cutting diagram for your exact stock sheets.