3 years later...another cabinet drawer!

So those of you who have found it in your souls to travel to Texas to visit know that we have a couple pull-out drawers in our kitchen cabinets. The first one we installed was purchased from our cabinet manufacturer. I was disappointed with the 3/4 extension slides and otherwise junky quality of this product and decided to build my own. The second drawer in this picture is the drawer I build in December 2006, which utilizes the full depth of the cabinet and has full extension slides.

I built this drawer out of pre-finished baltic birch drawer sides I ordered from either Rockler or Woodcraft. Building this drawer involved some improvising and messy router work, since I didn't have a table saw to do the joints I wanted to do. You can see in this picture my makeshift joint, along with my makeshift extenders for the drawer's face frame bracket to allow it to clear the door hinge.

After making the first drawer, I ordered materials to outfit my whole kitchen with pull-out cabinet drawers. I also ordered a dovetail jig to improve upon the makeshift joints I used. Finally, after all the supplies sat in my garage for three years, I finally made another drawer. This time I didn't use face frame brackets, and just installed filler wood in my cabinets so that I could screw the drawer slides to the side.

In addition, I spent the time to learn to use my dovetail jig! It took a couple hours to figure out how to use it and get everything adjusted properly, but now using this drawer stock I can create half-blind dovetail joints for a drawer in about 5 minutes! For a small box I made the joints were tight enough that I didn't even need glue, but for this larger drawer (about 19 x 22 inches) I used a few dabs of wood glue in the joints.

So, I am pretty happy with the new drawer. As you can see it is a bit crowded, so I intend to add another drawer above this one to hold small pans, lids, etc... Let's just hope it doesn't take me another three years to get to that one!