I just picked up a magazine called “The Family Handyman” at McNally Robinson this weekend. Admittedly, it was the cover that caught my eye: LOADS OF DRAWER SLIDES being used in “lower cabinet rollouts for increased kitchen storage”.  What a great idea, though not necessarily new.  There are all kinds of rollout-type attachments you can get (see Lee Valley or IKEA), but the idea of rolling out the contents of a cupboard (especially the lower ones) is always a great one.

I read the article and realized that the first thing I would do is use bigger (heavy duty) slides.  I realize that there are “kitchen” or “commercial” type slides out there that may be well suited to a kitchen setting but if you’re like me, and “over-engineering” is the norm, then you need something with more load capacity.  Consider this: If you think that your cabinet rollout will generally see no more than 100 lbs of stuff, then build it for 300 lbs!  My kids (I love them dearly) will find a way to use those rollouts as steps to help them reach the chocolate syrup that I’ve hidden in the top cupboard or that special glass on the rack.  Plan for those unintended uses!

Sounds crazy, I know.  When we started carrying drawer slides, the first thing I did was to build a slide-out garbage tray under my kitchen sink.  I used medium-duty slides that were rated for 100 lbs per pair.  I don’t know about you but I’ve NEVER carried out a garbage bag that weighed more than that so I was quite confident that I’d allowed enough margin for “unintended uses”.  Nonetheless, within a week there were complaints about how the slides weren’t working properly. Someone had stepped on the tray and bent the slides while they were extended… no more slide-out tray.

…and no more convenient stepping stool.

Click HERE for the link to the article in The Family Handyman!  Great magazine, by the way, definitely worth checking out.