In Which Built Ins are Unbuilt and Rebuilt

One of the charming bits of character on this house is the set of built in drawers in the upstairs hallway. Unfortunately, charming, so often synonymous with dysfunctional, in this case means worn out and unusable. The drawers and casing are likely original to the house and were constructed with S2S fir lumber (.75") and nailed up fir wooden runners. Over the years, the drawer bottoms managed to wear deep grooves in the face frame rails and constant forced openings left the stiles splintered and tore-out. Consequently, the drawers were nearly un-openable when empty, and would be unusable when filled with linens and other household goods. This set of drawers, along with the accompanying upper cabinet and broom closet, represents the only general storage space on the second floor and if we wanted to stop living out of boxes, we had to do something about it.

I had already fixed the upper cabinet doors when we first moved in because it was an easy fix to a frustrating problem. It seems like one of the prior owners had removed the elbow catch from the double door cabinet and never replaced it, leading to a cabinet that would not stay shut on its own. To make matters worse, the door with the latch was not plumb and would bind as it closed. How did the prior occupants solve this problem? They used a paper shim glued where the elbow catch should have been to wedge the door shut and blutak to keep it from swinging open when someone walked by. This kind of fix is everywhere in the house and it makes me cry a little inside. I scraped all of the jury-rigged junk out of the cabinet and installed a handsome solid brass elbow catch that cost a whopping $6 from Amazon: it even came with screws. I also took a look at the out of plumb door, and it turns out that the hinge wasn't screwed down all the way and took all of 10 seconds to bring into perfect alignment. hashtag ICan'tEven (that's a thing right?)

This was going to be a slightly bigger project. Because the rails were so damaged, I decided keeping them would be silly. That made the whole thing a bit easier, since I could essentially start from scratch, but I had to decide where I was going to buy myself room for new slides since the clearances around the drawers were so tight. I toyed with the idea of rebuilding the wood slides, but with drawers that are 42" wide and 23" deep, racking and jamming was going to be a constant problem. Still, it would be the option that would best preserve the "charm" and historic integrity of the house, and have the best conservation-minded future reparability.
Instead, I settled on simple fill extension ball bearing slides that don't have any fancy self-closing or push to close or soft close features that I always see broken after about 3 years. I bought a pack of 10 pairs in 22" length that I plan on using all around the house. For this application, the drawers are 23" deep, but the 22" slides will still give very nearly full extension. Typically, side mounted slides require side-to-casing clearance like in a kitchen drawer. These drawers have about 1/16th inch clearance on either side, so normally these slides would require the casing to be cut larger or the drawers rebuilt narrower. I didn't want to do either, and luckily, the drawer sides were thick enough to handle a 1/2" dado so I could recess the slides into the drawers themselves. It's not the best idea, but the only real option due to the tight tolerances.

I made a rough router template, but due to wear, indexing the template was difficult and I ended up having to widen the dados with chisels and utility knives to properly align a few of the slides. I added 1/4" plywood to the inside of the drawers to reinforce the weakened sides and to hide the tips of the screws that hold the slides in place.

I was a little surprised to find unfinished oak flooring in the case. It seems they installed the floor before they installed the built-ins (which makes sense in that the framing carpenter probably built the built-ins). It was a bit of a shame since there was more than enough pristine flooring to use in the patch job, which also happens to be directly in front of the built in. I considered keeping the worn rails, but I decided to remove and rebuild them for access into the case for framing and slider installation. I removed the old wood runners and furring and installed 1/2" plywood on either side of the case to hold the slides and make everything a little neater. Slider installation was about as easy as I could've hoped for. I indexed the drawers to the rails and took individual measurements for each drawer since they were all slightly different. My process to install the sliders streamlined by the eigth one, but it badically went like this: I marked out where each slide had to go based on the individual measurements, then I temporarily brad-nailed an piece of straight scrap into the plywood to help with leveling and alignment for each slide, and finally, I marked and drilled the location for screw holes and attached the slides, removing the temporary support whenever convenient. The hardest part was getting the alignment correct, since I had so little clearance to work with: if I had another 1/8th of an inch between the sides of the case and drawers, most of the binding problems I still am fiddling with would vanish. After test fitting all the drawers, I cut new rails out of a 1x4 and then had to re-align all the drawers to clear the rails. I still need to paint the new rails, but that's a low priority.

One of the unexpected benefits of installing the slides into dados is that putting the drawers back into the sliders is really easy since the dados are essentially self aligning.

Some of the drawers are a little sticky, but all in all, I am really happy with how this turned out. It goes a long way to making it feel more like home.