Here's a project I've been wanting to do for a long time. It combines my recent obsession with drawers and drawer slides with the practical need to make use of all the space we have in the kitchen island.
Today it's super popular to have pull-out shelving installed in kitchen cabinets. Unfortunately our house didn't come with this option so I figured I'd give it a shot. I had a good amount of wood hanging around that would be just perfect!
I picked up a set of 24" full-extension ball bearing drawer slides from Home Depot as the key component in this build. We have face frame cabinets, so I had to build up some structure for the slides to attach to. On the side against the cabinet wall, I used a couple of 1x3 boards as spacers to ensure the slides could clear the cabinet door hinges.
This shelf was going in one half of a double cabinet, so for the middle support, I took a 1x2 and screwed straight down through it into the cabinet bottom.
Once the slides were in place, it was time to make the shelf itself. I had a leftover square of 1/2" birch plywood so I decided to use that for the drawer sides. Then I made another Home Depot run and picked up some 1/2" MDF for the drawer bottom. Nothing fancy here, I just used butt joints and glue to assemble the box.
And it's a good thing I didn't do anything fancy, because even after trying to be super careful, I made the drawer exactly 1" too big to fit in the opening! Somehow I forgot to account for the drawer slides. So back to the table saw where I sliced 1.5" off the side of the drawer, and then reassembled with a new piece of birch plywood.
But finally, after some wrangling the drawer was installed.
And fully extended:
So I'm really happy with how this project turned out. It took quite a bit longer than anticipated, I thought this was something I'd knock together in a morning and I probably put about 7 hours into it all-told. But, hopefully any future shelves will go faster.
I'm also wondering if using bottom-mount drawer slides could have saved me some time & headache, so that might be something to explore in a future post!