Finally having our kitchen redone after almost 20 years of getting increasingly fed up with the sloppy layout and slipshod workmanship1 of the old cabinets has since left me spending more time in a different part of our house: the basement.
That’s because three weeks of spectacularly efficient work by our contractor to rip out the old cabinets, build the new ones and install new appliances left it to me to ensure that the drawer holding the tableware would not look like a utensil junkyard. And while a normal human might buy one of those expandable organizers from the Container Store or Home Depot and live with it sliding back and forth in the drawer2, I had made my own wood divider for the comparable drawer in the old cabinets not long after we moved in.
So I thought it was worth trying to repeat that effort, and reading a few posts on DIY blogs about building custom wooden drawer organizers reassured me that this was a feasible task.
For those of you who may also be considering the same DIY adventure, here’s how everything worked out.
First, I measured the knives, forks and spoons, inventoried everything else we’d had stashed in the old drawer, and mapped out how I could efficiently divide a 19-in.-by-19-in. drawer. That yielded a layout with two modules: one frame with five boards to separate the knives, big forks, small forks, small spoons, big spoons, and other small flatware, and another to split the space between that frame and the back of the drawer into four spaces for larger serving spoons and forks, our strikingly large assortment of cheese utensils, and our even more curious surplus of napkin rings3.
The parts that I had to buy:
- Two ¼ in. x 2½4 in. x 48 in. poplar hobby boards
- One ½ in. x 2½ in. x 48 in. poplar hobby board
- One set of foam brushes to stain the wood, plus steel wool to smooth the finish
- 10 #4 1 in. wood screws
I opted to fasten everything with screws instead of the glue recommended in many of those how-to posts because the old, glued-together divider had started falling apart after years of having metal utensils sliding around inside it.
I already had the other supplies I needed–a small can of wood stain, 100-grit sandpaper to prep the boards, and leftover #4 ½ in. wood screws and #6 1½ in. wood screws. And all the necessary tools were also on hand: a basic miter box and saw to keep cuts straight, a cordless drill, a screwdriver, a set of chisels, and a combination square to ensure joints would be at right angles.
To build the tableware frame, I cut one 19-in. length of ¼ in.-thick board to butt against the outside wall of the drawer (with recesses carefully drilled out to accommodate the two screw heads sticking out of that) and then a 19-in. length of ½ in. board for its other end, with five 9½ in. lengths of ¼ in. board running between.
After some further experimenting with possible arrangements, I decided to cut a second length of ½ in. board at the exact length to fit between this frame and the back of the drawer, ensuring that nothing would slide back and forth. And then I cut shorter lengths of ½ in. board to run from that spine to each side of the drawer.
(Except I cut all three pieces slightly too long, requiring trimming with a chisel. It seems I’m a “measure twice, then cut twice anyway” guy.)
Sanding each board, staining it, and then finishing it off with the steel wool was by far the easiest part, and it made me realize how I’d missed woodworking since completing the last of a few tiny projects in my pre-parenthood days.
Fastening everything together, however, was the hardest part. There isn’t much margin for error drilling screw holes into the thin end of a ¼ in. board, and I had to replace one of them after my inaccurate work left a side starting to split. But after some painstaking assembly of that frame, screwing the remaining three lengths of thicker board together was no problem–and then I could drop them all into the drawer, transforming it into a smartly-organized space.
Did this work save me money? Quite possibly not. Even valuing my own time at $0/hour–an underrated lifehack to justify any DIY venture–buying a prefab drawer organizer could have been cheaper, since the wood alone cost $22 and change.
And yet the results of my handiwork–unique to my kitchen, and a precise fit for that spot in it–are something I appreciate multiple times a day. That means a lot.
Plus, taking on this project also led me to make a few extra, simpler dividers for the other drawers, and now I’m starting to sketch out two more small woodworking projects. I’m in no danger of catching up to my brother, but it’s nice to reacquaint myself with this extremely analog hobby.
As in, some bozo had “secured” the upper cabinets to the walls by pounding drywall anchors into the plaster and then fastening the cabinet boxes to those plastic plugs. God only knows how they never fell off, even during an actual earthquake. ↩︎Considering how great the new cabinets are, I would have paid a premium for a utensil organizer from KraftMaid–but they don’t sell one sized for the width and depth of their own standard-sized drawer. ↩︎I don’t remember us registering for that many of these things before our wedding, but apparently we did? ↩︎In the spirit of “measure twice, cut twice anyway” I incorrectly listed the height of these boards as 2 in. before. ↩︎https://robpegoraro.com/2024/05/24/yes-you-can-make-your-own-utensil-drawer-dividers/
#4 #6 #carpentry #ContainerStore #cutlery #drawerDivider #drawerInsert #flatware #forks #HomeDepot #knives #knivesForksSpoons #KraftMaid #poplar #spoons #tableware #utensilDrawer #utensilTray #utensils #woodworking
Jake Brown
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Rob Pegoraro
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Britta
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