Another pretty simple project – but one that has been really helpful. In our kitchen, most of our lower cabinets came with a drawer-shelf thing half way up the cabinet. This has been great for increasing the storage capacity of small dishes etc. But in one of the cabinets where we planned to store our cutting boards, we had to remove it to make the boards fit.
We left the drawer slide tracks in place and would just chuck the cutting boards in the bottom of the cabinet. Instead of that, I decided to design a cutting board organizer that could pull out using the draw slides already partially installed. Unfortunately the draw slides were the “under the drawer” style so I had to cheat and router a slot in the side to accept them. I unfortunately messed up on the width of the organizer. I was very afraid of making it too wide because then it wouldn’t be able to fit and I couldn’t very easily make it more narrow. So, I decided to make it 1/4″ narrower than I thought I needed. Well, it ended up being 1/4″ too narrow so I guess I should have just gone for it. But this way I was able to compensate with a small piece of 1/4″ MDF and it fits fine.
I built the whole thing out of leftover 1/2″ sanded plywood. I glued the whole thing together and didn’t use any screws at all. The organizer has a large space for large cutting boards, a smaller space for smaller cutting boards (and some cook books) and then a small cubby for cloth napkins.
