How to retrofit 20 year old kitchen drawers?

[makeitso]

Hi, I've got some 450mm drawers in the kitchen that I really want to upgrade and reuse the drawer "face". My main annoyance with the existing one is the depth of the drawer box is about 360mm so it's really impractical and lots of longer items don't fit, can get cutlery tray organisers that fit, etc. the drawers have the cheapest slides as well so nicer soft close runners would be good.

There's heaps of space behind to go to 500mm depth..

So I was looking at a Kaboodle 450mm "metal sided soft close" drawer to just see how it might go, but I noticed the internal width of the drawer base cabinet in the showroom was 417mm and mine is 426mm so thered be about 9mm "extra" gap like 4.5mm each side.

I assume that kaboodle unit won't be able to fit then unless I install some extra wood/spacer to "narrow" the internal cabinet by 4.5mm each side. Am I going about this all wrong? If this is actually a good solution any advice on how to make such a precise spacer? Does precision actually matter?

Cheers!

[JacobZ]

Hi @makeitso,

A warm welcome to the Bunnings Workshop community, it is fantastic to have you join us.

Thank you for your question about retrofitting your kitchen drawers with new Kaboodle 450mm Metal Sided Soft Close Drawers.

Having looked through the Metal sided drawers installation video from Kaboodle's YouTube page, I can't see any reason these drawer runners couldn't be used in your circumstance.

Knowing that the melamine Kaboodle use is 16mm thick, the internal width on a 450mm cabinet should be 418mm so I suspect the cabinet you measured may have bowed inwards ever so slightly meaning you'd only need to make up 8mm. This tells me there is a small amount of room for play in these drawers which bodes well for us considering your plans.

While screwing the runners in place, which you can see at 1:12 in the installation video, you could simply place 4 x 1mm Window Packers behind each screw point on both runners to set them at the correct spacing.

After this step, the only other change I can see from a standard installation is the hole locations on the back of your drawer faces. Using the same logic applied above, the screw holes seen at 6:48 in the installation video would need to be moved in 4mm on either side of your drawer face.

Let me know what you think and if you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Jacob