DIY Sliding Shelves: Easy Upgrade, Huge Savings
This post is about my experience installing sliding, pull-out shelves in our kitchen cabinets. It was an extremely satisfying and easy DIY project, and we saved over $600 by not hiring a contractor.
Background
The kitchen in our house had been remodeled as part of the house flip. It has a large island with cabinets underneath it on both sides. These cabinets constitute the majority of the storage space in the kitchen. Unfortunately, as is often the case with decisions made by house flippers, the cabinets looked good but weren’t very functional. The problem was that accessing these cabinets required awkwardly squatting down and reaching back. Plus, even though they were large cabinets, there was a lot of dead “air space” – they couldn’t hold much stuff.
The solution was to install sliding shelves. We wanted two in each cabinet, one on the floor and one halfway up, which would double the usable storage space and make it easy to access the contents.
As with most homeownership projects, you can hire someone, or you can do it yourself. I called two contractors who did this type of work, and their quotes ranged from $120-$200 per shelf. On the DIY side, I found a couple of different companies that would manufacture sliding shelves to custom dimensions and ship them to you, along with the mounting hardware and sliders. I used a company called Shelves that Slide, which offered a 10-pack of premium shelves for $599, or roughly $60 a shelf. They make a wide variety of products for kitchen and bathroom cabinets, but in our case, we just needed simple shelves.
The DIY Sliding Shelf Experience
To place an order, we needed to take careful measurements of the cabinets and decide how to mount the shelves. Our cabinets had floating half-shelves in them, which is a typical design (and extremely hard to reach when the cabinets were on the ground). Therefore, we needed different mounting hardware for the bottom shelves (which attached to the cabinet floor) and the top shelves (which attached to the existing half-shelf and the cabinet wall). Luckily, the company provided detailed instructions, and because our cabinets were all the same, we only had to figure it out once.
Once the shelves arrived, it took about two and a half hours to install them all. It was a similar experience to our DIY cellular shades project: once we figured out the first one, installing the rest was easy. All we needed was a screwdriver and drill.
The Savings
I was surprised at how affordable custom-made sliding shelves are when you’re willing to provide the installation labor yourself. It’s easy to add DIY sliding shelves to a cabinet, but hiring someone to do the job for us would have cost an additional $600 at least. Doing this project ourselves saved us $240 an hour!
Note: The other DIY shelf provider I came across was called Slide-A-Shelf, which sells its products through Amazon, Home Depot, Costco, etc. This company also seemed okay but was more expensive.