How to EASILY Add Pull Out Drawers To A Kitchen Cupboard

Add pull out drawers to any kitchen cupboard with the help of this is easy tutorial.

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I store all of my small appliances in this cupboard and it is an enormous pain. I am constantly shuffling things around trying to reach the items in the back. I often have to pull out several items to be able to get to the one I need to use. The whole cupboard was just NOT functioning well and I have put off dealing with it for yearssssss.

Here’s the thing… could my husband build something from scratch to fit here? Absolutely. Does he have the time to do it? Nope! And I don’t want to nag him to find the time. I don’t like to add stress to his life or mine when we don’t have to, so I got online and started looking for a solution.

And I found the most genius product! It’s called the Slide-A-Shelf sliding shelf kit. The makers of this pull out shelf kit thought of everything. You can enter your measurements and get a custom sized shelf to fit your cupboard perfectly. It comes with a template that makes it super easy to install. You just line up the template and screw four screws in and you are done.

Okay, not quite. There are a few more steps to be able to convert a double cupboard like ours into one giant pull out drawer, but as far as the actual drawer installation? It really is just four screws.

Let me walk you through everything we did step-by-step so you can see just how easy this was. I’m hoping you’ll read these instructions and then feel confident that you can conquer this project too.

Step 1: Order The Product

Step 2: Remove Center Stile

This vertical piece of wood here is called a center stile:

If your particular cupboard doesn’t have a center stile blocking the way of where you want to put your pull out shelves, you can skip this step.

To maximize the storage in this cupboard, I wanted large pull-out drawers the full width of the cabinet, so this center stile obviously had to go. My husband used a jig saw to cut off the stile so that it was flush with the top and bottom of the cabinet frame.

This left a gap in the front edge trim on the shelf, so we replaced the entire edge with a new piece of scrap wood cut to size. It needed to be done anyway because that front edge of the shelf was really dinged up and damaged from sliding heavy appliances in and out of this cupboard.

I sanded the top and bottom edges until they were smooth, then I touched up the paint. When we were finished, there were no traces that the center stile ever existed.

Step 3: Install The Sliding Shelves

This is the easiest step of the entire process! The shelves come with excellent instructions to follow, but here’s what you need to know: use the templates they send with the drawers and all you have to do is line up the template and screw four screws into place. It was so, so simple.

The template lined up the sliding drawer hardware perfectly and once the screws were in, we just clipped the hardware on the drawers into the hardware in the cupboard and the drawers were done! And just look how neatly allllll that stuff fits back into the cupboard.

I’m impressed with how much weight they can hold. Even with all these appliances fully loaded, the shelves slide out nicely and feel really sturdy.

Now you may be asking yourself, “What about the giant gap between the doors because you cut out that center piece?” Fear not! We figured out a simple solution.

Step 4: Add Gap Filler

Because we cut out the center stile, when we close the cupboard doors, this is what it looks like:

Uh oh! Giant gap!

Don’t worry, there’s a pretty simple solution. We cut a piece of thin wood to size and screwed it onto the back of the cabinet door so that when you close it, the wood sits flush with the cabinet face frame and fills in the gap.

It fits perfectly and you totally can’t tell it’s there when the door closes!

Here’s a short video showing you the slide out drawers in action.

Pull Out Drawers Video

I can’t even tell you how much better this cupboard is now. I can see everything. I can reach everything. I swear I hear angels singing every time I open the doors! It’s going to make my everyday life infinitely more enjoyable.

One of my concerns going in was that I would lose storage space. I live in a small home and have to take advantage of every nook and cranny. Adding the shelves meant we lost a few inches along each side and an inch or two in height. I got rid of two random appliances we never use, but I was able to fit everything else back in. So the space loss was pretty minimal and totally worth it for the increased functionality. Just something to think about before you start this project. I knew we’d lose the side inches, but I hadn’t thought about the height difference. My rice maker is pretty tall and it just barely fits on the new, higher shelves.

It’s a glorious upgrade and I am just so grateful that for once a project was easier than I expected. We finished the whole thing from start to finish in one afternoon. It was worth paying the reasonable price of the product to actually get this project done quickly and without headache. I’m a huge fan of Slide-A-Shelf brand and I would buy these again in a heartbeat!