Day Seven-o-six: sink tray

And now we are complete. Or at least our kitchen is with the last piece in place.

For anyone who wants to install their own sink tray, here's the story of what we did today. We started with a hole.

And the puzzle piece that fits into it.

As we have with converting everything else to the inset style, we had to add shims to which we could attach the hardware for the drawer.

What made this more tricky than usual is that we had to work around the sink and the countertop. In a normal kitchen we would have attached all this hardware before installing either, giving us maximum room to maneuver. Alas, we can't go back in time. So we improvised. 

Here are the hinges for the drawer front and the shims. The depth was about 1/16 difference so we marked them to make sure we used the correct one on each side.

Then we drilled pilot holes to attach these two together. Unlike what the directions say, we could not attach the hardware to the frame first because we would never have had the space to drill and screw into the drawer front.

We set everything up, unattached, to make sure we weren't making any mistakes. Here's the top-down view of the drawer in progress and a close-up of one side.

Here's how everything looked from the back. The small metal plates in the bottom corners is where the hinges attach to the drawer front.

After drilling six holes into the back of the drawer (four to attach the hardware and two for the tray) we fixed the hinge in place.

Then we turned to making the tray. What you get from the manufacturer is 36-inches long, but we needed only about half that. So after measuring carefully and checking twice we cut this piece down and added the connectors.

Here's the whole drawer front ready to go into the cabinet.

We left the tray off to give us space to screw the hinges into the shims on each side.

Then we added the tray back.

And here's what it looks like closed.

If anyone's interested in trying this for themselves, we highly recommend this brand.