I am a little late in posting this project. I started this project in October of last year, so I still had very little woodworking practice under my belt. My top computer desk drawer was always a mess. Below is how it should have looked at all times, but I usually wound up throwing stuff wherever. While it may not be the most disorganized and messy drawer, I would still have trouble finding the items I needed.
So I decided to do a couple of DIY desk drawer organizers that were very specific to certain items.
The bottom organizer would have things I didn’t need to access as often:
And the top was the more common office/desk items I’d need. I didn’t put a backing on the far right slot so it would align with the bottom one to allow for larger items like notepads.
As you can see from the picture above, it is far, far from perfect. These were a royal pain in the butt to make. I used 1/4″ sande plywood from Home Depot and didn’t have a miter saw at the time. I cut everything with a jig saw without a guide, so some cuts weren’t completely straight. I also didn’t have any type of nail gun at the time, so I used wood glue to attach all the divider pieces and finishing nails to nail on the backing (also 1/4″ sande plywood). It was a royal pain trying to get the pieces to stay straight while clamping other pieces down when wood gluing a piece or two at a time. After this project, I knew I needed a nail gun at some point in my life (which is now in my small arsenal of tools). Manually nailing the small finishing nails on the backing turned out to be a huge challenge also. With the pieces I was nailing into being just 1/4″ thick, it was hard making sure the nails stayed within the divider piece and didn’t come out on the side, thereby giving you a perfect way to jab your finger on something when reaching in to get something out of the finished divider.
But I finished the dividers and told myself I would re-do them one day! Now that I’ve had a chance to see how it functions, I definitely need a different solution. I think I need to break down and get fully extending drawer slides, but the idea of installing or re-doing drawer slides scares me right now! As you can see from the picture below, one section of the top divider is impossible to get to, and my stamps and tape area are not the easiest areas to reach. At least this project offered me some practice, which I will need a LOT of!
