It’s funny how a little bit of plywood could make a daily frustration OH so much better. Hope this may help you as well!

A Little Background…

In our 2018 Host Cascade, we have pretty decent kitchen for a truck camper. Our options did *not* include a stove, which at first I was quite sad about. I do enjoy cooking and baking and thought that would be an issue. Instead, I’ll use the convection microwave when we are at sites with electric (this works great for pizzas, bread, all the stuff I shouldn’t be eating!). When staying somewhere without electric connections, I’ll convert to things I can make on the stove or the Blackstone Grill. And YES, we’ve successfully made homemade pizza on the Blackstone! when we were visiting Copper Harbor (our success is at the end of the video).

But I digress….

Since we don’t have the stove option, we instead have a wonderfully large drawer to keep all of your larger kitchen items in – pots and pans, blenders, etc.

The Problem

For the first few years prior to full-timing, I just kept a few things in there (but heavy ones, like our cast iron pan). Over time, the cheezy Luan bottom started pulling away since it was just connected by staples. The result were “droopy drawers” that were causing problems with sliding in and out. You can see by the bottom of our Luan where it was hitting.

Honestly, I ignored this for awhile but it really became more apparent when we started full-timing. That’s because that drawer was PACKED! We have a ton of items that we regularly use in there, from sheet pans (great for no-bake bars to carrying items out to the picnic table) and pots and pans to immersion blenders and plastic nesting bowls (good for cooking and ALSO washing dishes when boondocking!) If you’re interested, we have a whole section of kitchen gear showing the items we’re using while on the road…

With all that weight, we started having a lot of problems just getting the drawer open and closed. Something needed to be done. So, when were were visiting family, I decided to tackle this amazing and awful drawer.

Stop Saggy Drawers

The first step was to do something with that Luan that really wasn’t doing a great job. I first thought of simply replacing the Luan with some plywood. Here’s why I chose not to do that:

• Height – Luan is pretty thin and my plywood is not. It’s possible that the extra height might make getting that drawer back into the cabinet difficult
• Slide Rails – If I replaced the Luan with the plywood I’d have to move the slide rails down or else the drawer would hit the cabinet face. And I suck at making these level so it sounded like more work without a ton of value

Instead, I chose to add plywood on top of the Luan (in the drawer) and pull the Luan up with a bit of glue (I used Gorilla glue) and short screws. A pretty simple job (though glad I could use Gary’s dad’s table saw instead of our battery-powered circular saw). I did have to use a drill bit the size of the screw heads to take a little bit of the Luan off to recess the screws.

The discoloration is due to that continued contact with the bottom of the drawer face, shown above.

Drawer Organizers

Since I had the drawer out, I decided to add some dividers in the drawer to hopefully improve organization. So far, it has worked and I curse much less when going to pull out items in the drawer!

I used the rest of the plywood I had to make 3 sections – one for items that can be stored vertically (on the left) and 2 areas to organize my nesting bowls (back side) and my nesting pots and pans (front side). I didn’t need a ton of height and that allowed me to use the scraps more effectively.

Since I was unsure of this configuration, I decided not to hard-mount the dividers. I added some small vertical blocks to keep the dividers from moving around, which seems to be sufficient enough. It’s not pretty but it works for me!

The Final Result!

Here’s the view of the drawer with everything in there. I use the pots and pans most often so they are forward. The sheet pans can now come out without everything else falling around it. My reuseable bags are nicely tucked in the back right side of the drawer. Not too shabby.

The only thing I’ve done since this upgrade was to get better material to protect my pots and pans (instead of the paper pieces that came in the packaging). I found this material at Walmart but you can get it on Amazon as well.