Pull out kitchen drawers

Recently I had a few try-to-build-something-nice type projects like this, and I’m not gonna lie, I enjoyed this one too. The client was an elderly gentlemen who had problems reaching down for the kitchen units and taking things out from the lower shelves. So the idea was, that we build 6 kitchen drawers out of furniture boards, source some fully extendable drawer slides and convert the shelves into drawers.

I would like to put a disclaimer here: I am not a joiner, carpenter, cabinet maker by a long shot. I know I could have done things differently, however I don’t own a workshop not even a work van so I had to make good with what I had. I also didn’t price this job nowhere in the range where a professional cabinet maker would. The client was aware that this will be more like a DIY job and he was happy to go ahead.

After taking some measurements, I bought some materials, drawer sliders and edging tape and got to work. To start with I had to work out how the drawer sliders won’t hit the kitchen unit doors and their hinges. So I had to make some spacers first, edge the sides of them, fit them on the side of the units and install the sliders. We lost a bit of space width-wise like this, but we had just enough space for the sliders to extend fully without hitting the hinges or the doors.

After this we could install the drawer sliders on top of the spacers we made. The next step was to start creating some drawers out furniture boards. This doesn’t sound too tricky if you have a workshop, which I don’t. And, to make matters even worse, the first day all the heavens opened up and it was raining non-stop. This meant that before I could do anything, I had to setup my little gazebo on the customer’s drive, so I could do some work while the materials stay dry. So gazebo up, sawhorses out, and I started cutting. I don’t own a rail saw which could have come really handy here, so I just used my circular saw, a long spirit level and a couple of clamps and created a DIY rail saw.

After a lot of setting up and cutting, I started to assemble the units. Pre-drill and countersink each holes, use some dowels, screws and a few hours later I had my drawers assembled. After this I had to cover up the cut edges, so I get out the edging tape and got to work. It is not a fast process and frankly, edging chipboard is not the most exciting thing to do. But I pushed through and once the shelves were all completed, I started installing them. This was the easy bit really, couple of screws here and there and voila, we had 6 drawers. Customer was happy with the end result and I learnt quite a lot during the process as well.