Tutorial: DIY Drawer Dividers Kitchen Edition | Hawk Hill

As I mentioned in my bedroom drawer divider post. spring means an attack on chaos at Hawk Hill and the kitchen did not escape my organizational wrath this year. Like most 1920 s homes, my kitchen is cute but tiny, and boasts only 4 drawers total! These drawers, as you can imagine, quickly become a jumbled mess that off-the-shelf drawer organizers are never tough enough or large enough to handle.

While construction grade foam board worked great for dividers for the bedroom dresser drawers, these high-traffic drawers needed tougher, thinner dividers to maximize storage space. Thin pine craft boards from the lumber yard worked perfect! 3/8 thick by 3 inches wide was the perfect thickness and width for my shallow kitchen drawers.

At about $1 per foot, I wanted to make sure I minimized waste when cutting the boards, so before even buying my boards I cleaned out my drawers completely and used strips of corrugated cardboard to design and play around with options for dividers. When I d created the perfect arrangement, I hot glued my cardboard strips together and took measurements.

Use cardboard strips to plan your drawer dividers before cutting your boards.

I created my dividers joints in two ways: fitting together boards by notching them (done with several parallel cuts with a miter saw) and T-type joints that were glued and nailed with small finishing nails.

The notched boards were eazy to zip through with my miter saw- Although that type of saw left some rough, angled edges at the end of the cut, the edges are completely concealed when assembled:

If you don t have a piece spanning the full width and full depth, be sure and place pieces to make up that difference- this will prevent the divider from shifting within your drawer:

Joints that are joined as a T rather than two interlocking boards will need to be glued AND nailed with a small nail:

With the help of pre-planning with cardboard strips, this project took less than an hour- not counting a new application of contact paper and time spent waiting for glue to dry. I m thrilled with having better looking, better functioning drawer dividers!

I m really pleased with the final result- and actually pretty impressed by how easy it was to create professional looking DIY wood kitchen drawer dividers on a budget. And a new liner of houndstooth contact paper didn t hurt a bit, either!