DIY Kitchen Cabinet Drawer Help!

Submitted by byzantinesaint t3_yee1l6 in DIY

I'm coming up on the end of a DIY kitchen renovation and need some advice!

Part of this project was repainting the cabinets, which involced removing the drawers. The roller slides that were originally installed were ancient, flimsy, and squeaky as hell, so we figured we'd just remove all the hardware and get new drawer slides to replace the old crappy ones.

Come to find out (after throwing away all the old hardware, naturally) that our cabinets were built by an insane person. The old hardware consisted of a (very unstable) metal track in the center of the opening attached to the lip of the cabinet and the back wall, and a little (squeaky and wobbly) wheel that attached to the bottom of the drawer itself. I was planning on just picking up whatever was at Lowes, but they seemed to only have drawer hardware that attaches to the flush to the sides of the cabinet the drawer.

So the reason I'm accusing the old homeowners of insanity is that all the cabinet sides are around 1.5" away from the side of the drawers - there's no way they'll be flush. Also, one drawer was basically floating in a void - there's no cabinet walls surrounding it at all, just big empty cabinet space.

I'll comment with attached pictures for reference. What on earth should I do? Have any of y'all dealt with something similar?

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frenix5 t1_itxir4l wrote

I'm hazarding a guess prior to seeing it but couldn't you build interior framing to support the slides?

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byzantinesaint OP t1_itxko2b wrote

I probably could if it comes to that, but I'd rather avoid purchasing a saw for one little project. It seems like that would be a fairly simple solution (just attaching a small length of wood to fill the gap) everywhere except in the space which I'm calling The Void. There's nothing to attach a frame to in the space next to the dishwasher!

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frenix5 t1_itxnn49 wrote

If you do, a Japanese handsaw is relatively inexpensive on Amazon. I have one and adore it.

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danauns t1_itzig3s wrote

I hear your accusation of insanity, and raise you on the fact that you dismantled it, removed and tossed all of the old hardware ......and don't have a plan for how to proceed.

And you don't have tools.

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byzantinesaint OP t1_itzu9ch wrote

Never said I wasn't! This house and I were made for each other - much like the previous homeowners I'm content to blindly blunder my way through a project with no skills or experience, treating every step as a learning process, asking help along the way. They just didn't have the advantage of reddit strangers to neg on their optimism.

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03223 t1_itxp2ii wrote

They make brackets to mount the back of the slides to the rear wall.

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projecthouse t1_ity1svr wrote

I hate to break this to you, but you almost always have to design the cabinet around the specific hardware you buy. There's not much standardization in the industry. You can't just swap out one brand draw slides or another ... and I'm guessing this brand (style) died a long time ago.

You're almost certainly going to have to mod the base cabinet to support modern draw slides.

But don't just buy something, and hope you can make it work. Look online for three or four options, and download the install instructions. See which style will be the easiest to use based on the cabinets that you have.

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caddis789 t1_ityt0qz wrote

You can get center mount drawer slides. You may be stuck with that. As you've found out switching drawer glides isn't easy, or simple. In addition to the void inside the cabinet, meaning there's nothing to hang the glide on, you also have to take into account the clearance of the drawer box and the face frame. Side mount glides will need 1/2" clearance on both sides of the drawer box through the face frame. I can't tell for sure, but it doesn't look like you have that space. Undermount glides are out there, but they all have some space requirements under the drawer box, which I doubt you have. So, unless you want to make new drawer boxes, and make whatever inside structure you need, you're best bet is probably to stick with the center mount glides.

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