In the previous post I showed how to save some precious space in a small kitchen by mounting the trash and the organic waste bins on the kitchen cabinet door.
In this post I`m going to show, how I made a pull-out drawer for detergents and other home care products from scrap wood.
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What I used
As I`ve mentioned in the previous post, because of the lockdown I used what we had at home:
- a peace of thin 10 mm or 1/2″ OSB board one can find in Home Depo (you can use chipboard or any other scrap wood of the appropriate size you find at home);
- a pair of Euro drawer slides (later replaced by ball-bearing drawer slides (+20$));
- some leftover turquoise paint;
- the sound panels wood (simple 2x4s).
This project also costed us nothing. Though, later I replaced the 60 cm (24″) Euro drawer slides with ball-bearing drawer slides (+20$).
Two-tier sliding organizer
Here are some organizers I found for standard kitchen cabinets:
Soft-close slide-out wood drawer shelves (pricey but made of real wood);
Transparent 2-tier under sink organizers
Adhesive pull-out cabinet organizers you can just glue to your shelves
But, unlike the standard kitchen cabinets, ours are made of bricks and concrete, so, figuring out a new peace of organization item is quite a challenge. This one took me more than a year to “invent”.
We needed a sliding-out something, and that sliding-out something needed drawer slides, which sequentially required a wall or something. But the thing was that this space was hollow – detergents, some bricks sticking out of the concrete floor along with the sink/dishwasher drain, and hot/cold water valves. Here is exactly what this tiny 0,75 m3 (1 yd3) space contains:
– dishwasher (behind the door to the left);
– dishwasher filter;
– drinking water filter (in the corner to the right);
– sink (the undercounter part of it);
– 2 garbage bins;
– 2 water valves;
– detergents and other cleaning supplies.
Side walls for drawer slides
As I started with the dishwasher (mounted it to the custom-made butcher block countertop), I got going from it – screwed an OSB panel to its side (there are mounting holes on both sides of the dishwasher for security screws to attach it to the cabinet sides), to the countertop and to the back wall with small corner brackets:
Then I cut out a thin OSB board (about 15 cm or 6″ wide) and attached it to the wall with a corner bracket on one side and to the cabinet door support with a screw, on the other side.
And attached the wall-mount runner of the Euro drawer slides to these walls by 12 mm (1/2″) screws.
It`s much simpler to install the drawer slides in a wooden cabinetry, which all the normal people have.
Drawer
I cut out two custom shaped boards from the OSB so the drawer could fit in along with the dishwasher and sink drains (there`s no way to hide or move them, I have to live with it).
Also cut the sides for the two drawers. And here comes the most interesting part. . . How to assemble all this tiny thinny OSB laths together. . .
I tried just to screw it all together with the small 12 mm (1/2″) screws. Not bad so far. But there`s going to be about 5-10 kg (11-22 lb) weight on it so I needed something more reliable. I took the 2×4 sound panel wood and made a reliable vertical support from 4 bars: 2 for an x-cross stretcher on the back, one at the right side and one at the front-left side. The x-cross stretcher was quite a challenge (there`s an instruction on how to make it in this post). I started with it as a marker for the other two bars` height. BTW the height of the whole organizer was determined by the level of the compost bin`s folding shelf (see previous post) because it was to fit under that shelf.
When the x-cross vertical support was ready, I made a hole in the upper drawer for the front vertical support, passed it through this hole:
and fastened the two tiers together by putting screws everywhere I could 😆 : into the sides, bottoms and tops of this drawer. When the height and the level of the organizer are checked, we can attach the final right-side bar, paint the whole organizer:
and put it on its place:
Aaaaand . . . when everything is packed up, it turns out, that you can`t close the door because the upper drawer impedes the rubbish bin! And you take the handsaw and start cutting off the corner. . . in the middle of the night, because you don`t want to see this chaos again tomorrow! 😆
Drawer slides mounted on different levels
We didn`t have 60 cm (24″) ball bearing drawer runners at home, so I attached what we had – the Euro drawer runners, but they didn`t bear the fully loaded organizer. So, eventually, I replaced them.
There was an issue with the left drawer runner, I couldn`t install it on the same level with the right one, because there`s the cold water pipe running on that level. Thus, I attached it to the upper tier of the organizer. First, I mounted the right runner and installed the drawer in it:
Then, using the level, marked the place of the left runner; pulled out the organizer and attached the left runner to the marked place.
And finally placed the two-tier pull-out under sink cabinet organizer on its place, and loaded it with all cleaning stuff! 😀
And finally I can see clearly, that we have TWO bottles of dishwashing liquids (which will probably last till the end of my life 🙂 )
Pin for later!
Feel free to leave your tips for the under sink storage in the comments below!
