Pull out pantry drawers
Off our kitchen we have a deep (30″) pantry that we use to store flour, sugar, salt, etc. It has always been annoying digging to the back to pull out what you needed. Especially when the flour made its way back there since it was the heaviest.
I had the idea of making it into drawers instead of shelves and proposed my change to my wife. She loved the idea and I headed online to order drawer slides for the project. They had 28″ drawer slides in stock, which is the perfect fit.
When confirming my measurements, I noticed that we could fit 3 drawers. 2 larger ones that could fit the largest containers we had, and 1 small drawer at the top. I didn’t know what the top drawer would hold at the time, but figured we would find something.
The first obstacle was the right side was 3.5″ past the door casing. The slides would have to be in line with the door casing, so I would have to build that out. I used some scrap 1×2’s and plywood to build out the casing but used the old shelves to give a solid MDF panel to screw my drawer slides too. It was already painted the same colour as the cabinet, so there was an added benefit. 🙂
The drawers were made quickly out of plywood I have on hand (thanks to my new vertical plywood storage cart I built a couple months ago! I then used some solid birch for the top rails and front to cover the plywood ends.
After making the first 2, I realized that the top drawer could benefit from a thinner bottom panel for added height in the drawer. I also had some acrylic on hand from a past project that happened to be almost the exact size I needed. With the height of this drawer being above my wife’s head, it would help her find things without getting a step stool out.
For the hardwood edging for the drawers and draw fronts, I didn’t want to go through the process of milling more wood. I looked to my pile of misc. lumbar and found 2 panels that I glued up when I first got into woodworking. I don’t remember what my original intentions were with these, but they had seen better days and were a bit warped. Since the edging was going to start out at 1/2″ thick before going to my new drum sander, That should be thin enough that any minor warping would be fixed.
I cut the drawer fronts out of the same pieces of birch. There was certainly some differing colours to this birch. The beginning was the typical yellow-hue, then it went to more of a maple colouring before showing some spalting, which is dark lines through the wood.
We were eager to get this inside and put to use so I finished it with spray lacquer and left it outside for the day to get any smell off of it from the finish. Overall we are very happy with this project.


