Skip to Content

How to Make DIY Kitchen Drawer Dividers

As I mentioned in my bedroom drawer divider post, spring means an attack on chaos at Hawk Hill. This year, the kitchen did not escape my organizational wrath.

Like most 1920’s homes, Hawk Hill’s kitchen is cute but tiny. The kitchen has only 4 drawers total! These drawers, as you can imagine, quickly become a jumbled mess that off-the-shelf drawer dividers are never tough enough or large enough to handle. DIY kitchen drawer dividers were needed to contain the kitchen chaos.

Kitchen organization matters. Food is one part (of many) of a person’s larger health picture, and there’s some researched backed evidence to suggest that a well-organized kitchen can positively impact our eating habits.

While construction grade foam board worked great for drawer dividers for my bedroom dresser drawers, these high-traffic drawers needed tougher, thinner dividers to maximize storage space and stand up to shifting cutlery each time the drawer opened and closed.  Thin pine craft boards from the lumber yard worked perfectly to make these durable drawer dividers! 3/8 thick by 3 inches wide wood boards were the perfect thickness and width for my shallow kitchen drawers.

How to make your own custom wood drawer dividers for organizing flatware and serving utensils in a kitchen

At about $1 per foot, this wood wasn’t cheap. To make sure I cut my boards right the first try and didn’t waste this expensive wood, before even buying the wood I cleaned out my drawers completely and used strips of corrugated cardboard to design and play around with options for dividers. When I’d created the perfect arrangement, I hot glued my cardboard strips together and took measurements.

Use cardboard strips to plan your drawer dividers before cutting your boards.

I created my dividers’ joints in two ways: fitting together boards by notching them (done with several parallel cuts with a miter saw) and T-type joints that were glued and nailed with small finishing nails. (Update 2016: this project has help up well, although the glued and nailed T joints have needed repaired once. The notched boards have worked well maintenance free)

The notched boards were eazy to zip through with my miter saw- Although that type of saw left some rough, angled edges at the end of the cut, the edges are completely concealed when assembled:

blog_hh_kitchen_bd_5632

If you don’t have a piece spanning the full width and full depth, be sure and place pieces to make up that difference- this will prevent the divider from shifting within your drawer:

DIY Instructions to make kitchen drawer dividers: Hawk-Hill.com

Joints that are joined as a T rather than two interlocking boards will need to be glued AND nailed with a small nail:

DIY Instructions to make kitchen drawer dividers: Hawk-Hill.com

With the help of pre-planning with cardboard strips, this project took less than an hour- not counting a new application of contact paper and time spent waiting for glue to dry. I’m thrilled with having better looking, better functioning drawer dividers!

Before Adding DIY Kitchen Drawer Dividers:

blog_hh_kitchen_bd_5629

After Adding DIY Kitchen Drawer Dividers:

DIY Instructions to make kitchen drawer dividers: Hawk-Hill.com

Custom drawer dividers offer a range of benefits over generic plastic drawer dividers. Firstly, custom dividers are tailored to your specific needs, ensuring that they fit perfectly into your drawers and provide maximum organization. With custom dividers, you can create compartments that are precisely sized and shaped to fit your items, preventing them from shifting around and becoming disorganized.

In addition, custom drawer dividers are made from high-quality materials, providing durability and longevity. Unlike generic plastic dividers that can become brittle and break over time, custom dividers are built to last and withstand frequent use (and they wont clank around nearly as much as generic plastic dividers). By investing in custom dividers, you can ensure that your drawers remain organized and clutter-free for years to come, ultimately saving you time and frustration in the long run.

DIY Instructions to make kitchen drawer dividers: Hawk-Hill.com

I’m really pleased with the final result- and actually pretty impressed by how easy it was to create professional-looking wood DIY kitchen drawer dividers on a budget. Paired with a new drawer liner of houndstooth easy-cean contact paper, my kitchen drawer interiors were ready to tackle all of my kitchen utensil.

Making heavy-duty DIY drawer dividers

I chose wood for my drawer dividers after finding that the premade plastic cut-to-size drawer dividers just weren’t tough enough for my kitchen drawers. See, the problem is I like really nice flatware. Straight out of college, I filled my kitchen with typical inexpensive stamped flatware that manufactures make cheaply from stamped and shaped steel.

These lightweight spoons and forks fit compactly in a drawer and a fairly lightweight, but have you ever noticed how much more satisfying it is to eat with silverware that has a nice heft to it? I did, and so the plain but heavy Oneida flatware shown above went on my Christmas shopping list one year. Using heavier flatware has proven to be so much more durable as well – and three or four moves later  (and two separate downsizings as I transitioned from a regular home to tiny living to digital nomad travel and back to typical housing!) This flatware still my favorite and gets partitioned into a drawer divider in every kitchen I move into.

How to make extra deep dividers for kitchen drawers

The beauty of these custom wood DIY drawer dividers is that they are almost infinitely customizable. By choosing finishing lumber or trim in different dimensions, you can create shallow, deep, or extra-extra-deep dividers for your kitchen drawers. Making very deep dividers can be a great way to keep utensil drawers organized, as deeper dividers contain even the most boisterous of tongs, spatulas, and spoons.

Cardboard kitchen drawer dividers

Because I did my first drawer dividers with cardboard to develop a divider style that worked well for me and my flatware, I get questions from time to time about using cardboard to make DIY kitchen drawer dividers. You can definitely use the instructions above to give it a go. Follow the first two steps of this tutorial to create a cardboard version of these drawer dividers. The problem is, unless your flatware is mostly plastic or very lightweight metal, you’ll find that the cardboard dividers simply don’t hold up.

Every time a drawer is opened or closed, the silverware and utensils are thrown up against the partitions. This wear and tear tends to wear out dividers pretty quickly. If you try this with cardboard, you’ll probably want to use double or triple corrugated cardboard and perhaps add a layer of contact paper to help the paper stay a little more durable.

Using this technique for my bedroom dresser

After realizing how simple these drawer dividers were to make, I actually purchased more boards and used the same process to create neat dividers for the top drawer of my dresser, where I store my scarves and handkerchiefs:

DIY Instructions to make drawer dividers for shallow drawers: Hawk-Hill.com

Love this tutorial but need drawer dividers for clothes or underwear? Check out my tutorial for dresser drawer dividers:

blog_hh_drawer_bd_5602

Thanks for Reading!!!

I hope you can tell that I love DIY, researching the best affordable solutions for every-day problems opportunities and documenting / sharing solutions!🙌 Hawk-Hill.com is reader-supported.

☕ Hawk-Hill.com is reader-supported. If this article saved you time or money, please consider donating $1 to help me cover the cost of hosting this website OR If you appreciate this information and want to throw a “Thanks!” my way by buying me a coffee – I would Of Course appreciate it! :]

Reader Questions and Recommendations

Readers, do you have any favorite topics / posts? What would you like to read more about in the future? As I hope you can tell from this and other articles on my site, I really enjoy DIY / a good challenge, and I’m not afraid to roll up my sleeves to figure out a great, and hopefully simple 😁 solution. So please feel free to let me know in the comments below (or reach out via social media)!

Ok Really – I’ll try to wrap this up now😂

Finally, if you’d like to continue to learn about interesting DIY options as well as how YOU can tackle creative new projects consider checking out the latest and most popular articles listed on the Hawk-Hill Home Page. I’m always trying to enjoy and write about the creative side of life so please don’t be a stranger – check back often!😍

If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy reading / perusing / devouring😊 one or all of these articles as well!

Helen

Friday 17th of July 2015

I like your style for my junk drawer and want to make it look just like your pics however you do not state if this divider can be easily REMOVED for cleaning Please?

Lindsayanne

Wednesday 22nd of July 2015

Yes!They lift right out for cleaning!