Install Center Mount Drawer Glides

With the sink in place and the caulk thankfully dried down clean we were ready to get moving forward on the rest of the project.

The name of today’s game?

Make old homemade cabinets work with modern center mount drawer glides.

The old drawers had these babies in them way before we got to them:

Of course the wheel had been removed from the back of the drawers so they didn’t function at all and would fall out when you pulled them half way out but that’s Georgia craftsmanship for ya. Quality stuff I tell you. They also didn’t have handles on them and would stick to the cabinets so you did a lift-wiggle-unstick-pull action to get them open a good 50% of the time.

We lived with those drawers like that for over a year and you can imagine my thrill at the prospect of real functioning silverware drawers….it’s the little things in life right?

It took Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) all afternoon to laboriously retrofit the drawers to fit but we did it!

We discovered that a square on one end and a level on the other was the easiest way to get everything looking straight and groovy.

Our level has a magnetic strip on it which is super helpful.

All screwed in and looking good.

The new glides came with plastic guides which were supposed to push into the cabinet with these tacks. We couldn’t get them into the very hard wood though so we simply removed the nails and glued them in place.

Gorilla glue works best for this as it dries fast and hard.

Push them right up into the corners and hold in place til they are tacky. Then sand down to the proper height with a heavy grit sandpaper.

We then had to attach the other half of the glide to the drawer bottom and fine tune the adjustments until they slid in just right. One drawer was taller than the other and so Kevin had to sand and dremel off the top a good 1/4 inch to get it to slide in properly.

I happened to be tinkering with the sink and dishwasher while he was doing this and missed the pictures of it. But I made quick work of getting the new handles out and attaching them. After a quick adjustment on one which magically didn’t have holes in the same places as all the other ones we were finished! They are beautiful and work wonderfully!

I keep walking into the kitchen and forgetting that I have drawers that work and pulling them up.

Holy smokes.