help me replace my dresser drawer bottoms!

November 26, 2023 10:05 AM

This is an easy one, I think: I love my bedroom furniture, but after eight years, the panels at the bottom of my very wide dresser drawers have warped so much that they won’t stay in the grooves they slide into. Do I want to replace them with 1/8” plywood, hardboard, or something else?
posted by centrifugal to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

I presume the warped panels are made of medium density fibreboard (MDF) because that's commonly used and cheap. But MDF is basically just slightly upgraded cardboard, and it copes well with neither humidity nor constant loading.

Hardboard is slightly upgraded MDF, and in the thinner grades it eventually fails in much the same way MDF does, just slower.

Decent quality 1/8" plywood will certainly hold its shape better than either of those materials, because the crossed wood grains give it good stiffness. Better still would be 3/16" plywood with the edges planed or sanded down just enough to slide into the existing 1/8" grooves, though that's obviously a lot more work.

Something else that might be worth your while: gluing two or three hardwood bracing strips to the underneath of the plywood panels, equally spaced and oriented parallel to their long axis. Make them a little shorter than that axis so that they don't foul the grooves.

The same store where you get your plywood will probably also have some hardwood mouldings that would do nicely for this job. As long as they're no thicker than the height between the grooves and the bottoms of the drawer walls, they shouldn't interfere with the way the drawers slide.

You might even find that you can get more years out of your existing MDF panels just by gluing braces underneath them to flatten them out a bit.
posted by flabdablet at 10:48 AM on November 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Another trick worth trying would be just to slide the existing panels out, turn them upside down and slide them back in again so that the weight of the drawer contents is now trying to flatten them rather than bend them more. If that works, gluing bracing strips to what used to be the top of them but is now the underneath should straighten them just enough that they no longer slip out of their slots and keep them slightly domed, and therefore resistant to sagging, for a very long time.
posted by flabdablet at 10:56 AM on November 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Like fabdablet says -before plywood, 1/2” or thicker pine was used and thinned down at the edges to fit into narrow grooves. If you go with braces, I would think running them back/front would make them less likely to catch on the clothes. Or maybe just glue slightly smaller plywood panels onto the bottoms, leaving the edges thin? You'd want to remove them and clamp everything onto a flat surface.
posted by brachiopod at 1:18 PM on November 26, 2023

How easy this is to fix depends on how handy you are. I agree with the idea of using thicker plywood and planing/sanding down the edges to fit into the existing grooves as well as, if possible, putting braces under the drawer bottoms to help prevent this from happening again. Braces may not be possible because there is often very little clearance between the drawer bottom and the top edge of the front of the next drawer down.

Turning the bottoms upside down is an easy fix and may just do the job and last for a while, albeit probably not the eight years you've got out of it so far. The material has already lost some of its structural integrity. But this is something I would do first and see how it goes.
posted by dg at 5:14 PM on November 26, 2023

Maybe try flipping the bottoms over, and laminating 1/4" plywood to them. You'd need to cut the plywood to the exact size of the interior of the drawer, the affix the plywood to the original bottom. VHB tape would work well for this.

If you use this plywood, you'll have cedar lined drawers!
posted by Marky at 7:41 PM on November 26, 2023

Braces may not be possible because there is often very little clearance between the drawer bottom and the top edge of the front of the next drawer down.

If that's an issue, then given that these are dresser drawers rather than drawers for stuff like documents that actually needs the drawers to have perfectly flat bottoms, putting the braces on the top surfaces would also work.
posted by flabdablet at 8:32 PM on November 26, 2023

Decent quality 1/8" plywood will certainly hold its shape better than either of those materials, because the crossed wood grains give it good stiffness. Better still would be 3/16" plywood with the edges planed or sanded down just enough to slide into the existing 1/8" grooves, though that's obviously a lot more work.

1/8" plywood, then a second piece of plywood on top of it, cut to the interior size of the drawers.

On preview: what Marky suggested
posted by Stoneshop at 4:07 AM on November 27, 2023