6 Toe-Kick Drawers Built from Ekby Rails and 15-Millimetre Birch Ply

Measure the toe-kick opening before you buy anything. Standard IKEA Metod and Sektion base cabinets leave a recess around 88 to 100mm tall behind the plinth, and the depth to the wall or cabinet back varies from 540mm down to whatever the previous installer left you. Six drawers means six openings across a run of base units, or two or three fat drawers if your cabinets are 800mm wide. The Ekby rail, sold as a shelf bracket rail in 790mm and 1190mm lengths, is not a drawer runner. It becomes one when you cut it into flat steel strips and screw a nylon glide against it, which is the whole trick and also where most people give up.

Why the Ekby rail instead of a proper runner

A toe-kick drawer that is only 85mm tall cannot take a side-mount Blum runner. The runner body itself eats 12.5mm per side and needs a drawer box wall that clears it, and by the time you add the box you have lost the little height the void gave you. The Ekby steel rail is 3mm thick. Screwed flat to the cabinet base as a track, with a matching strip on the drawer bottom, it lets the drawer ride on almost nothing.

The honest downside is there is no soft close and no full extension. You get about 70 percent of the drawer out before it wants to tip. For baking trays and chopping boards that is fine because you are lifting flat items straight up. For anything you need to reach the back of, this is the wrong build and you want the Blum Tandem or Movento in a shallow profile instead, which pushes your minimum opening up around 100mm.

Cut the rail with a metal-cutting blade in a jigsaw or an angle grinder with a thin cutoff disc. Deburr every edge with a file. A raw cut Ekby edge will score the ply glide and the drawer starts binding within a month of daily use.

Cutting the birch ply so the grain does not blow out

15mm birch ply, ideally Baltic birch with 9 or 11 plies, gives you a drawer that stays flat at 85mm height where a solid pine board would cup inside a season. A single 1525 by 1525mm sheet yields all six drawer bottoms and sides with sensible offcuts if you plan the cut list first.

Score the cut line with a marking knife before the saw touches it. Birch face veneer tears out badly on a crosscut, and a scored line severs the top plies so the blade lifts clean fibre instead of ripping it. Use a fresh 40 or 60 tooth blade and put the good face up if you are cutting on a table saw, good face down on a plunge saw with a track. The splinter side is always opposite the blade exit.

Drawer sides at 85mm finished height need to account for the rail glide sitting under the bottom panel. Subtract the 3mm rail plus a 2mm running clearance from your opening height and cut the sides to suit, usually landing around 78mm. Dry fit before glue. Ply thickness marked as 15mm often measures 14.2 to 15.4mm depending on the mill, and your rebate joints will not close if you cut the dado to a nominal 15mm and the actual stock is thinner.

A 6mm ply drawer bottom sitting in a 6mm groove 8mm up from the base edge keeps the box rigid without adding weight. Glue the bottom into the groove on birch and it stops the box from racking, which matters when the drawer is only held by two thin glides.

The fronts

Superfront makes drawer fronts and legs sized to IKEA carcasses, and their plinth-height fronts cover a toe-kick drawer cleanly with the existing kickboard look. Order the front 3mm undersize on height so it does not scrape the floor when the drawer rides out.

Fitting the glides and setting the running clearance

The drawer runs on two points of contact: the Ekby strip screwed to the cabinet base, and a facing strip on the underside of the drawer bottom. Between them goes a nylon or UHMW tape glide so steel never runs on steel. 3M make a self-adhesive UHMW strip in 12mm width that sticks to the drawer strip and slides on the rail with almost no friction. Skip the tape and you get a screech and black metal dust in the drawer within weeks.

Set the running clearance at 2mm total, 1mm each side, between the drawer box side and the cabinet opening. Tighter than that and any seasonal swelling of the birch jams the drawer solid in July. Looser and the drawer wanders off its glides and drops a corner. Test with a folded strip of card at 1mm as a feeler gauge on each side during install.

Screw the cabinet rail down with 3.5 by 16mm pan-head screws into the cabinet base, checking it runs dead parallel to the cabinet sides with a combination square off the front edge. If the rail toes in or out even 2mm over its length the drawer binds at one end of travel. Pre-drill the steel with a 3mm bit or the screw walks off centre and pulls the rail crooked as it bites.

The stop is a single screw at the back of the drawer strip that catches the end of the cabinet rail. That is your 70 percent extension limit and also what stops the drawer flying out onto your foot when someone yanks it. Position it before you fit the front.

Osmo Polyx on birch, and the trap in it

Birch ply drinks finish unevenly. The face veneer soaks oil differently from the exposed end grain of the plies, so a single coat of Osmo Polyx-Oil 3032 satin leaves the edges looking starved and blotchy next to the faces. Sand to 180 grit, no finer, because burnishing birch past 220 closes the grain and the oil sits on top instead of keying in.

Apply Polyx thin. The instruction on the tin says a very thin coat and it means it: one heaped teaspoon covers close to a square metre. People slather it on, it stays tacky for three days, and then it wrinkles. Wipe on with a lint-free cloth, work it into the end grain of the plies, and wipe back any surplus after ten minutes. Two thin coats twelve hours apart beat one thick coat every time.

Oily rags left balled up genuinely self-heat and can catch fire. Lay them flat outside to dry or drop them in water in a metal tin. This is the one part of the finishing that is not a cosmetic warning.

Inside the drawer, a single coat is enough for wipe-clean without making the surface slick. On the front face where hands and shoes hit the plinth, three coats hold up. Recoat the front every couple of years by scuffing with a grey Scotch-Brite pad and wiping on one thin coat, no stripping needed, which is the reason to use a hardwax oil over a film lacquer down at floor level where a lacquer would chip and need sanding back.

A worked cut list for the run

Say your run is three 800mm base cabinets, giving three openings each 764mm wide and 90mm tall, 560mm deep to the wall. Two drawers per opening splits into six drawers at 380mm width each, or run one wide drawer per cabinet for three deep ones. For six 380mm drawers: twelve sides at 540mm by 78mm, six backs and six sub-fronts at 350mm by 78mm, six bottoms at 350mm by 528mm in 6mm ply. That nests out of a single 1525mm Baltic birch sheet with the 6mm bottoms coming off a separate half sheet.

The Ekby rail in 790mm length cuts into two 380mm strips with a 30mm offcut, so three rails cover all six drawers plus the drawer-side strips if you rip them narrower. Budget roughly the cost of one sheet of Baltic birch, three Ekby rails, a roll of UHMW tape, a half litre tin of Polyx-Oil, and six Superfront fronts if you want the matched look instead of ply faces.

The thing nobody tells you: shallow drawers on flat glides run beautifully empty and sluggishly loaded, because the weight of a stack of cast iron pans presses the glide into the rail. If the drawers are going to carry real weight, that is the point to reconsider whether 70 percent extension and no soft close is what you actually want under there, or whether the extra 15mm of opening height for a proper runner was worth reclaiming after all.