Stop pulling your wooden kitchen drawers out onto your feet with this new hopefully-OSHA-approved kitchen drawer tip!

Background:

Some older home have “simple” built-in drawers that are just a wooden box that slides on some wooden rails (instead of metal drawer slides).

These drawers are fine for rarely-accessed items, but can be quite annoying in frequently-used situations (such as kitchen utensil drawers).

The Issue:

Since these drawers typically don’t have any sort of “stop” mechanism to keep them from being pulled out all the way, it’s completely possible to accidentally pull out a full drawer of knives and drop it directly onto your feet. This is considered to be a bad idea.

It’s unfortunately not immediately obvious how much additional distance a drawer can be pulled out before it will fall out entirely (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: This drawer is pulled out about 60% of the way. Or is it 80%? Or 99%? Who knows! How much farther can we extend the drawer before it will fall? It would be nice if there was some way to tell how “dangerous” the current drawer-extension distance (shown in magenta above) is.

Proposal:

This is actually an easy fix! We can just mark the drawers at the point where they will fall out (Figure 2), and then add a “warning” indicator a few inches before that point.

Fig. 2: Here, the drawer will fall out if it’s pulled slightly beyond the red electrical tape. The yellow tape is a “hey, watch out, the drawer is maybe about to fall on you” indicator and the red tape is a “hey, the drawer is REALLY going to fall on you” indicator.

We could also imagine spray-painting these markings onto the drawer or using reflective tape to make it really obvious.

Conclusion:

Electrical tape works quite well, and is easy to apply (or remove). See Figure 3 for what this looks like in the real world.

Fig. 3: The electrical tape makes it quite clear when you’re approaching the “drawer is pulled out too far” threshold.

PROS: May prevent you from dropping a drawer full of knives and barbecue skewers onto your feet.

CONS: None!

Originally published 2024-12-09.