It’s just too tempting to buy inexpensive furniture. A lot of it looks good, and for a fraction of the prices of higher end pieces, we’ve definitely acquired several dressers from Ikea and similar places.

It seems as if even when these relatively cheap dressers hold up well overall, the drawer bottoms always end up sagging. You know what I’m talking about – the thin, flexible panels are just barely held in place by little grooves, and after your stuff sits on them for a while, the bottoms bow and come out of the grooves.

Thankfully, there’s an easy fix for this problem, so you don’t need to be annoyed or get rid of your furniture.

Tutorial for repairing sagging drawer bottoms:

You’ll need:

• square wood molding.  We used some that is about 1/2″ on each side.
• strong glue, such as wood glue
• saw for cutting molding
• hammer
• fine nails, like brads
• optional: woodworking clamps
  

  Tools for reinforcing sagging drawer bottoms.

This is not a big carpentry job at all, and once you do it, you’ll be so much happier!

• cut sections of square molding a little shorter than the width of your drawer bottoms
• push the drawer bottom into place and glue a piece of molding under it to add support.  Here’s where the woodworking clamps might come in handy, if your drawers bottoms are really sagging and won’t stay in place.
• nail brads through the molding and into the drawer front, to hold the molding in place.

Sagging drawer bottom reinforced with molding, glue, and nails.

Hope that helps!  I wish that I could do fun stenciling and painting projects every day, but some days, I just need to get boring repairs like this one done.

“Jewels”