Traditional furniture drawers – wooden drawer on wooden slide

Typical reasons why a standard wooden drawer would stick are loosened joints or worn timber. Most furniture drawers are constructed with a thin-wood bottom slotted into grooves around the base of the drawer. lf the corner joints of the drawer have worked loose, the bottom might be falling out and jamming. Similarly, loose joints might be making the drawer wider so that it jams on the sides of the cabinet.

  • Pull the drawer right out.
  • Prise open any loose joints by tapping with a wooden mallet or hammer (against a block of wood to protect the furniture finish).
  • Chip off old glue in the joints and re-glue with white PVA adhesive. You’ll need to clamp or weight the drawers in position to keep them square while the glue dries.

More commonly, the slides on the bottom of the drawer, and the slides on the inside of the cabinet that the drawer runs on, wear down in the middle into grooves or curves which interrupt the flow of the drawer. Place a straight edge or ruler along the draw slide (i.e. the bottom of the sides of the drawer, below the drawer bottom) to see how much of a curve has developed. Mark a straight pencil line along the slides, at the top of the groove but parallel with the top edge, then plane or sand the slides flat using the line as a guide. You might need to dismantle the drawer (as above) to do this. 

If, when you replace and close the drawer, there is a gap at the top, you might need to attach a piece of wood veneer to the slide to raise the drawer a little. Wood veneer can be bought in rolls at a hardware store and can be heat-glued into place with an iron. Trim the edges with a cutting knife and sand smooth.

If the drawer slides inside the cabinet are worn, unscrew them, measure them and cut (or have cut) some pieces of wood the same size to replace them. Alternatively you could plane them and build them up with veneer.

Never paint the sides of a drawer. The paint can cause it to stick. Run some candle wax along the bottom of the drawer to help it run freely.

Easy-run modern drawers

Modern drawers run like a dream until something goes wrong, and that’s usually something to do with worn rollers, missing ball bearings or screwed-up screwed-on slides on the side of the drawer.

To extract a modern drawer from its cabinet it’s best to empty it first. Pull the drawer open as far as it’ll go, hold it underneath on both sides and lift upwards and and back towards you. If that doesn’t work, there may be a release lever on the side of the drawer.

Drawer slides on the bottom or side of a modern drawer come in many shapes and forms. Problems with them might be as simple as a loose screw or screws. If they won’t tighten satisfactorily, you might have to replace them with longer or heavier gauge screws, but be careful that the longer ones don’t penetrate right through the width of the timber and jam the drawer. Make sure, too, that the head seats in as well as its predecessor did, so that it doesn’t impinge on the sliding mechanism. Some slides are held on with metal staples. Replace them with small screws, which are sturdier.

If the rollers on the slide are worn out of round, or are loose on their bearings, you might have to replace the whole slide. Take the drawer to your hardware store to match the slide with a new one. It might even be worth considering replacing all the sliding mechanism on the drawer with a heavier duty one. Your problems might result from the slide not being strong enough to cope with the weight in the drawer.