How to Make an Organizational Tray for Your RV Storage Drawers

Isn't it great in your RV to have a place for everything and everything in its place. I think the problem we have here is everything ended up in this place. What a rat's nest of stuff we have down in there. What we really need is a way that we can organize this with big stuff on the bottom, little stuff on the top and to be able to easily get out the little stuff when we need it. It's a solution that we can provide by heading to the shop.

We're going to add a little tray to this drawer. Going to make it a lot easier to find whatever we're looking for. First thing I did with the drawer once I got it into the shop was take some measurements. What I'm going to do is make an organizational tray for this thing that slides this way back and forth in the door from the end to the end. So in order for it to slide it's got to have something to slide on.

We've got to get some rails in there. So I cut these strips out of half inch plywood. They're two inches wide, and they're going to get fastened inside the drawer case, just like that. Big deal is that I want to make sure it goes in there nice and straight parallel to the drawer itself. And I'm not a big fan of measuring.

I'm a big fan of using spacers whenever I can. So I cut these spacers to go up against the bottom, just like that. Now, when I put the rail on this side and then I in a second put the rail on the other side, I'll know they're parallel, and they're located exactly the same. The dimension for that is going to be such that we get the top of this rail in about the center of the drawer. Now there's nothing that's real set in stone about that.

It's just going to depend on what you want to use organizational tray for and how deep or how shallow you want it to be. But in this case, I've got that set. So it's in the middle. So a little bit of glue, couple of staples, and we'll have this rail in and then we can do the other one. Now we've got something for the tray to rest on inside there.

So what we can do is start working up the components for the tray itself and I've already got parts cut for this. What I like to do with the tray is make it so that when it's in its position, so in this case slid up against the back of the drawer I can still get to the front of the drawer or just the opposite, I could slide the tray forward and get to that part of the drawer without having to take the tray out. So what that means is that we want this component the one that's going to go in this direction to be about half the size of the drawer. So this length is one half this dimension. And when I cut those, I made three of them because we're going to have a left, my left alright.

And then a couple of dividers that go in the middle here. For the pieces going the other way, those need to be cut so that they'll fit inside the drawer box very easily. We want to be able to slide this back and forth without a lot of restriction. So I've got this cut about an eighth inch shorter than the inside dimension of the drawer. So now we're ready to put the tray together.

Again using that half inch plywood, very handy stuff easy to get works great for this the way the parts are made then as this piece has to go over this one, because again this length is equal to the inside dimension of the drawer. I'm going to stand this piece there temporarily just to give me something to lean on. Here we go. Now I'm ready for that internal divider. And remember I said just a little while ago I hate measuring.

I like using spacers. So I'm going to apply that same idea here. This is the distance I'm going to set from the edge of the inside corner here to the divider. So if I use that spacer like that then I don't have to do any measuring at all. And I know that it's going to come out exactly the same on both sides.

As I put this in, I'm bow in the side of the door or my tray out just a little bit. So I don't smear glue all over places. I don't want there to be glue. And inside here you can do as many or as few compartments. If you want, if you want it to, at this point we could cut another piece, going this way.

We could cubby hole this thing however you need to, depending on what it is you want to put in there. For the bottom, I've got my dimension set up for something a quarter inch thick to go on there. And that could be anything hardboard, plywood. I'm going to use this stuff because I had some scrap leftover and it's pretty cool stuff. This is actually cedar closet lining.

So if we had smellovision instead of television you'd be able to smell this Western red, cedar aroma coming off of this right now. And when we get it inside that clothes drawer you're going open the drawer. It's going smell like cedar. That's really, really nice stuff. They sell this in four by eight sheets at home centers.

Got be a little bit careful handling it until it's installed. Because it is a particle board product. It's just a little bit flimsy. You know, if you bang a corner, it could crack off. So you want me to just a little bit careful in handling On this side, that's not aligned right now that doesn't bother me at all.

Because part of the job of a bottom is to pull everything square. So the bottom is square. The drawer box is sitting there just a little bit kittywampus. So I'm going to pull the box the tray to where it aligns with the edge of the bottom. I want to get a couple of staples into that divider but I don't really know where it is.

I can see the staples on this side and on this side where I fastened it, but I don't want to take a chance of just blind stapling here in the middle and blowing through and missing the divider. So I'll show you a little trick here. What I'm going to do is eyeball from those staples up to this edge and make a line. Same thing on this side. So I'm just transferring that staple location to the top.

And then I'm just going to use my tape measure as a straighter I'm gonna hook it on that side put it right on the pencil line align it with the pencil line on this side. And then I'm putting some pretty good tension on it. I'm pulling on it with my left hand to keep the metal rigid. And that gives me enough of a line to follow across there that now I know I can staple that and then let's see what happens. Okay.

With no misses at all inside the tray. In order for this to work well inside the drawer, what does help is just a little bit of sanding. So I'm just gonna knock these corners off and just a hand sanding block is fine for that. And I'll show you why this makes sense in a second. The reason I do that, is so that when this is in the drawer it slides back and forth more easily.

I find that if you leave those corners sharp sometimes if this turns just a little bit and gets cocked in there, the corners will catch. And then it's harder to slide. If you knock the corners off its very easy to move that back and forth. So that takes care of the organizational tray for this drawer. I'm telling you, once you have it in one here George, you're going to want to put it in all of them.

It's really going to go a long way to help and stuff stay nice and neat and organized. This is so much better. When I open the drawer I get a little aroma off of that Cedar bottom. We've got the tray in place here with little stuff on top, more stuff down below we've really optimize the storage that we can use in this drawer. And it makes it much easier to get at everything that we have in here.

This worked out really well. Case closed