We had a sticking kitchen cabinet drawer. The past tense gives away the ending of the story. But the path to it is what’s interesting
The drawer is one of those slow close affairs, which are slick when they work just right. This one drawer would not close with a simple push. It got stuck about halfway and then we had to give it another shove. Then it glided the rest of the way. There’s another drawer just underneath it that glides shut just fine.
I finally took the sticky drawer off the gliders and had a look at the underside. I don’t do things like that every day, of course. I avoid them whenever I can. I looked at a YouTube about it and there are orange clips under the drawer that the gliders connect with. You press the clips in on both sides and the drawer just lifts out. I’ve seen this kind of drawer before in a different house, even down to the orange clips.
That tells you this is not exactly my first rodeo with sticky drawers. This time it’s a different brand; it’s made by Blum.
Anyway, I thought I might have had the problem licked when I saw the splinter of wood jutting out from one of the sides. It turns out this was a symptom, not the disease. Removing the splinter didn’t remove the stickiness.
The gliders seemed OK. I thought it was the drawer itself (warped?). Maybe it was one or more of the fine-tune adjustments you could make with the slow close mechanism. I hoped not because I didn’t want to get caught up in an endless loop of move-it-one-way-a-little-and-then-move-it-back. I figured that could take half a day and end with more frustration than what I started with.
Then Sena came along and after she woke up from fainting after seeing I had actually tried to do something about the issue—she suggested I switch the top drawer with the bottom one.
That worked. Don’t ask me why. The sticky drawer is still a little sticky, but it closes a lot more smoothly. No more double shove.
So, if you get caught in a sticky drawer problem try swapping drawers—as long as they’re the same size.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 