How to Attach Drawer Slides

This is one of those posts that might seem boring today, but will be one you’ll want to pin and refer back to down the road.

I built a recycling centre last weekend (the completed project will be on the blog tomorrow) and I struggled with figuring out how to attach the drawer slides. I Googled and YouTubed and all I could find were 8 – 12 minute videos…. I SO don’t have the patience for that, so I thought I’d create a quick pinnable process that you can scroll through in about 30 seconds.

The Drawer Slides I bought came in pairs wrapped in tape. No instructions, no illustrations to follow. Frustrating!

I began with the obvious – in each pair you will find one glider that has a lip on it with screw holes through both the lip and the sides (see below). This is the rail that you attach to the drawer bottom. The image below shows how I screwed the rail to the underside of my drawer base – flip it over and you won’t see the white rail at all. There is an error in the below photo though – you do NOT screw into the sides of the base. I later had to remove this screw from my board because it acted as a stopper for my drawer – meaning, you won’t be able to pull your drawer out past that screw point, it stops short. Just screw the lip section to the bottom of the drawer.

Repeat on both sides – again, you are looking at the underside of my drawer here.

Next up you’ll want to take the second slide from your set and slide your drawer base into it. There’s usually an angle or a slight tilt, so you’ll have to wiggle and jiggle until it fits into the rail.

You’ll want to put some narrow spacers under your drawers before going further. I used paint stir sticks to raise my drawer slightly. Without a spacer, your drawer will slide against the wood beneath it and it will scuff your paint job and move sluggishly.

With your spacers in place take your drawer bottom, with the side rails held in place with your hands, and insert it all into your frame – in this case my recycling centre. Loosely test it out before you screw anything into place to be sure it will slide smoothly and that the placement (in this case to the back of the unit) will work for your purposes. Slide your drawer forward and mark your holes – at the front and back of the side rail. Pre-drill and screw into place.

The extra holes you see in the photo below work as stoppers. If you don’t want your drawer to pull all the way forwards, or close all the way to the back, you’ll want to insert a screw to mark your stopping point.

The recycling centre plans called for a 15″ drawer glide, but I was only able to find 14″ ones, so you’ll see that there is a space between the front of the cabinet and the beginning of the drawer slide. In attaching it to the drawer and doing a loose test before screwing into place, I was able to determine that this will work for my drawers. Attaching the glider side rails to the front of my cabinet would have meant that the drawer wouldn’t have closed all the way.

Repeat on the other side (with the spacers beneath the drawer again) and you’re done!

If it helps – I found the general rule was to have one wheel at the front of the unit (the drawer bottom piece) and one wheel at the back (the side rail piece).

Boring?

But something you’ll want to know as we progress through more and more DIY projects.

Have a great one!

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