For a while there, I didn’t think I’d ever be writing this post. Thankfully, this day has arrived and our kitchen cabinet pullout drawers have been successfully installed. If you recall, I built these drawers over a series of five posts (here, here, here, here aaaaannd here). In actuality, I think I spent maybe five hours altogether cutting, assembling and finishing them. I must have spent six weeks trying to get the right hardware for them!! Yikes is right. One of my goals for this project is to post some plans with variations for various joint configurations… maybe add a calculator so you can enter your cabinet dimensions and it will spit out dimensions for a sliding drawer. If you thought the joints looked daunting there are easy joint versions that I’ve got some ideas for. We’ll see!
The first piece of advice I can give you if you are thinking about building similar sliding drawers: GET YOUR SLIDE HARDWARE FIRST.
So, long, boring story short… I wanted to get the exact same slide hardware that are in our cabinets. I think it will look better if it weren’t a hodge podge of parts. I called a local vendor that carries our cabinet maker’s product line and they gave me a quote of $50 per drawer. No thanks. I then proceeded to try to make it work by trying to use what I could from Lowes, Home Depot and every other online slide retailer I could find. To hell with uniformity. Bottom line: no dice. Our cabinets have an interior depth of 23.” I could only find one set of slides that fit and had to buy the bracket for that separately only to find out that it didn’t play nice with our drawers. After losing a lot of hair I can’t afford to lose, I capitulated and called another vendor looking to grovel for a lower price. Luckily, this other vendor was able to get them for around $14 a set. Jackpot.
The best part of these slides is they install incredibly easy. The backs of the slides have clips that snap into pre-drilled holes the cabinet maker already has in my cabinets!! They must put them in there on every cabinet.
This hardware system makes this installation atypical compared to most slide hardware. If I didn’t have this clip and I had a regular slide and rear bracket like this…
I’d have to install the front of the slide into the front of the cabinet first, level off the rest of the slide by taping a small level to the center of it and then tape my bracket to the back wall, mark the holes for the screw, pre-drill and then fasten the bracket with screws. Got it?
All I had to do was worry about the front of the cabinets. A few of the cabinets had long screws that joined one cabinet to the next right in the area where the drawer would be. They were definitely getting in the way so I had to relocate them.
To relocate it, I just pre-drilled a small hole above the drawer hinge and then drove the screw into it. The holes for the front of the slides needed to be pre-drilled as well. Rule of thumb: If you need to screw into a hardwood (oak, maple, poplar, cherry, etc), you need to drill the hole first.
With the fronts attached, the drawer can slide right in. Btw, I also attached the slide hardware to the drawers too. Same deal, pre-drill, insert screw.
With both drawers in…
Glad that’s over. Sure beats rummaging through the bottom of a cabinet!
Overcoming any glitches on your end?
