BY TIM CARTER Tribune Media Services

DEAR TIM: We just installed new kitchen cabinets in our home, and now my wife wants handles on them, if you can believe that. To make matters worse, she selected D-type handles that require me to carefully drill the holes for the screws. There is little margin for error. The cabinet doors and drawers have a face frame that’s about 2 and 1/4-inches wide.

What secrets can you share so that I don’t goof up installing the cabinet pulls? I’m not really that great when it comes to measuring and I can’t afford a mistake. — Rusty W., Montrose DEAR RUSTY: Kitchen cabinet handles are fairly functional when you think about it. I know that you can open and close drawers and cabinet doors without them, but it’s really best that you satisfy your wife’s wishes.

The slender D-handle pulls can be a challenge to work with if you’ve got little experience. I agree that there is little room for error. That’s why I take the time to make a custom jig at the beginning of a job like this. You can buy stock plastic jigs and templates, but they don’t always have the holes in the locations for my liking.

The way I make my jig takes very little time. For standard D-handle cabinet pulls, I cut a rectangular piece of thin 1/4-inch plywood. A good size is 6 inches wide and 3 to 4 inches high. Now cut a 6-inch length of 3/4-inch by 3/4-inch wood. Glue this piece along the top edge of the plywood rectangle, making sure the top edge of the plywood is perfectly aligned with the strip of wood. This block of wood will rest on the top of the drawers or on the edge of the doors so that the plywood laps over onto the frames.

Now you have to hunker down and measure correctly. You need to ensure the face frame of the drawers and doors is exactly 2 and 1/4 inches. If it is, take a very sharp pencil and make a line that’s parallel with the long edge of the plywood. Measuring from the 3/4-by-3/4 block down the plywood, you want to make this line 1 and 7/8 inches. That’s the sum of 3/4 inch and 1 1/8 inch. The 1 1/8-inch measurement is half the width of your face frames.

Lay your jig on a flat surface

See BUILDER, page C42