I’m going to be working at my desk quite a bit, and one thing I found useful on my previous desk, was a shallow drawer under the desktop. It’s a useful space for pens and cables and suchlike.
IKEA don’t make anything like this so it was time to make something. I didn’t want the drawers to be too deep, otherwise I’d bash my legs on them. I did however, want them to be as long as possible – so I wanted to make them the full depth of my 50cm shelf desktop. I created 2 drawers because it helps to store different things, but of course you could have any number and make them any width to fit the space.
The Build
I bought 2 pairs of soft closing drawer runners from Amazon for about £15 per pair. I could have used cheaper runners for a third of the price, but I wanted to see how these worked, as I might be using soft close ones for some drawers to the right of my desk.
The drawer sides and the runners were 18mm birch plywood which is nice to work with a looks great. The drawer bottoms were made from some 3mm plywood off-cuts I had lying around.
The design idea was to simply attach the runners to the bottom of the desk-shelf using some 18mm plywood “uprights”. These uprights would in effect be below the shelf, and be 500mm deep to match the full depth of the desk. I made them 70mm high, as I figured that a drawer that was about 65mm deep would be about right (although this was not scientific!)
The uprights were screwed to the bottom of the desk-shelf using pocket screws. I love pocket screws as they are pretty quick to use and secure too. You need to ensure that the uprights are pretty much parallel, as otherwise the drawer runners won’t work very well.
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