Galaxy Frost 3 Drawer Base Cabinets

The roughly 30″ of drawer face on a base cabinet is not divided into equal thirds. The top drawer is shallow, around six inches of front, and the two below it split the rest. That asymmetry is the reason this configuration works: you get a proper utensil drawer at the top without giving up real volume underneath.

In clear interior height that works out to something like four inches up top and eight or nine in each of the lower two. Enough for plates stacked flat, food containers, dish towels, a mixing bowl set — everything except the tall pot, which is what the two-drawer version exists for.

Nine SKUs cover it: GF DB12, DB15, DB18, DB21, DB24, DB27, DB30, DB33 and DB36. The code is worth learning — a bare DB with no suffix is always three drawers, a -2 suffix is two, a -4 is four. Our guide to reading cabinet SKU codes decodes the rest of the catalog the same way.

This is the comparison every buyer runs and almost nobody publishes numbers for, so here are ours at three matched widths. Prices are live and move; the table above this article is authoritative.

So a drawer bank is consistently half again the price. The reason is not margin: you are buying three dovetailed ⅝″ solid wood boxes and six undermount runners that the door version does not contain. It is more cabinet, and it is priced like more cabinet.

The case for paying it is about reach, not volume. A 24″-deep door base holds roughly the same cubic inches, but you access them through an opening at knee height, and everything past the first foot means kneeling and pulling the front row out to see the back row. Full-extension runners bring the entire 21″ of interior clear of the face frame, standing up, in one motion. You are not buying storage — you are buying the back half of the storage you already paid for.

Where that logic does not hold: the sink cabinet, the trash pull-out, tall small appliances, and anything you open twice a year. Those go behind a single door or a pair of them, and the money saved buys drawers where you actually stand.

Because the total drawer face is fixed at roughly 30″ no matter how wide the box is, more fronts means shallower drawers — and Fabuwood only offers each count in the widths where the result is usable. The pattern is an inverse one, and this is the only page on the site that lays it out.

Read the table the other way and it becomes a planning shortcut: if a gap in your run is 24″ or wider you have all three options, between 15″ and 21″ you have three or four drawers, and at 12″ your only drawer bank is this one. There is no such thing as a 12″ two-drawer or a 36″ four-drawer, and a supplier quoting you one has made an error.

Budget about five inches less than the nominal cabinet width for the actual drawer interior — the face frame stiles and runner clearance take the difference on a framed cabinet. A 24″ box gives you roughly 19″ of usable width, an 18″ box about 13″, a 30″ box about 25″.

That number is the one that matters when you buy an insert, because the trays in this finish are sized by cabinet width rather than by drawer: GF DCD-18 BLUM and GF KCUP-18 for the 18″ box, GF KCUP-21/24 for the 21″ and 24″, GF CD-27/30 for the 27″ and 30″, and GF CD-33/36 for the 33″ and 36″. Nothing is made for the 12″ or 15″ units.

Browse what is stocked on the cabinet accessories page, and see the space-saving solutions guide for the pull-outs that do the same job inside a door cabinet.

The first is appliance collision. A drawer front projects into the room the moment it opens, and so does a range handle, a dishwasher door and a fridge door at 90°. Put a drawer bank immediately beside a French-door fridge and you can end up with a hinge stile that blocks the top drawer from clearing. Leave a 3″ filler at any cabinet that shares an edge with an appliance, and check the swing on paper first — the kitchen island clearance guide covers the same arithmetic for an island run.

The second is over-ordering. Drawers everywhere sounds right until the quote comes back 50% up on the base cabinets. The distribution we spec most often is drawer banks flanking the range and at the prep zone, door bases at the sink and the far end of the run, and one two-drawer pot cabinet under the cooktop. That puts the reach where you actually work and keeps the box list honest.

For the rest of the run — corners, sink cabinets, blind bases — start from the full base cabinet lineup or the whole collection.

Galaxy is the fastest-shipping series Fabuwood makes — 7 days to 3 weeks against 3 to 5 weeks for the rest of the Allure line — and every unit arrives pre-assembled with the boxes fitted and the runners adjusted at the factory. That is genuinely useful here: aligning four drawer fronts across a narrow box is fussy work, and you are not doing it.

It also makes these the heaviest cartons in the shipment. A drawer bank has the same box as a door cabinet plus three or four dovetailed drawers and two runners per drawer, so the freight weight roughly doubles. Have somewhere to put them: a garage or a spare room, not a hallway.