Repurposed Under-bed Drawer

Posted by Steve
One of our neighbours moved to a new house, and needed to get rid of a bunch of stuff. She didn't have a car so asked me if I could help take some of it down to the tip. I suggested that I stick it all in my garage and try to find homes for the various things first. That's how I ended up with a coffee table, cupboard, suitcase, two venetian blinds, two DVD players, surround sound speaker system, freeview TV tuner, folding highchair, baby play mat, plastic baby bath, metal candelabra, two large metal candlesticks, two IKEA Storm lamps, and a pair of dissassembled under-bed storage drawers. My wife sighed when she saw what I'd taken on, bless her.

Everything found new homes via Freecycle except for the cupboard - which is still in my garage, holding some of my other stuff - and the drawers - which I thought might be useful.


We had acquired a sideboard for our kitchen via Freecycle a while before, and I decided to modify one of the drawers to go under the sideboard. It had to be made narrower and shallower to fit, so I measured, marked and cut the side and front/back boards. The base is made up of small sheets of hardboard, which also had to be cut down.


There are some holes drilled in the base of the front/back panels where I guess some rods would go to support the base of the drawer. There wasn't any suitable dowel to hand but I did have some scraps of wood which I used to make some braces. They're not pretty, but they do the job (and they're invisible when the drawer is right way up).


The cut edges of the boards were much paler than the faces, so I used some wood stain to try to mask it. The colour's not quite right, but it's much less obvious than it was.


Some of the original casters were damaged but between the two drawer "kits" I was able to put together a set of four casters.


So there you go, the finished article: