04 Sep 2013

‘Quick’ custom drawers


The box shelves I built, so as to curb my daily wanderings into the living room for the purpose of getting dressed, did an excellent job of shelving things. But sometimes things should be drawered instead of shelved.

In my experience (and I once built a prop desk off of a three inch sketch, so I have at least some) drawers are boxes with hardware and/or framing that allows them to slide in and out. The box part should be exceedingly simple – it’s the functionality that requires some planning. Or, in the case of my never-ending collection of salvaged stuff, someone else’s planning that you save.

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These are two sets of drawer runners (two per drawer) from a damaged IKEA dresser I took apart a couple of years ago. They came off of fancier (damaged) boxes, so the plan is just to put them onto my new boxes:

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The easiest way to do this would have been to do everything off of measurements before the outer box was assembled – that, of course, was not the way I did things since I decided to build the drawers ex post facto. Plan your projects all the way through, that’s my new mantra.

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On the left – a quick fix after realizing I’d built the drawers a quarter inch
too narrow by misreading my own handwriting.

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They fit and they slide – now for a little decoration. Carpentry math: tape measure + speed square = finding the center of a board quickly and easily.

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Most drill bit sets also include this convenient shortcut:

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Mark the center, drill the center with the appropriate sized bit, attach handles, et voila. 

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