Recently we had our kitchen remodeled and new cabinets installed. The base units have large drawers for storage. The drawer where we want to store bread and spices was not working and it was difficult to see what was in the spice jars.
The silverware drawer had two layers accessed by a drawer within the drawer:
I thought something similar could work for the spice and bread drawer. I purchased some 5/8” maple offcuts from a local cabinet shop to make a divider and drawer carcass. Fitting the divider to separate the bread and chips from the spices:
Rough fitting the front and sides for the drawer carcass, to be connected with half-blind dovetails:
I decided to let in the drawer slides into the sides in order to have the drawer be a little wider within the space. I’m not sure the slight gain in width was worth the effort and the fiddling involved. I also thought that cutting the dados for the slides by hand would be faster and less dusty than setting up my router. I don’t think I saved any time, but it was quieter and definitely less dusty.
A shot for Roger, showing that a workshop can be dirty 
Drawer carcass in place:
Layout for the drawer sides:
Test fitting the drawer to the carcass before gluing everything up:
A few coats of rattle can lacquer and allowed to dry overnight. Doesn’t everyone hang their drawers on the front porch to dryJ?
Final assembly and installation. The drawer holds the spices that we use regularly and underneath are the larger jars and extras. Bread and chips are on the full depth other side of the divider.
The drawer slides back into the cabinet to access the larger jars and extras. Side note, I used soft close slides for this because the silverware has regular slides and that drawer does not stay put when closing.
Next step is to make something like this for the drawer, so that the spice containers can lay at an angle and make it easier to see the labels.
Thanks for looking.
Adding a drawer to a drawer
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Re: Adding a drawer to a drawer
#2That's a very functional modification. I can see where that concept could be useful in many applications.
Re: Adding a drawer to a drawer
#3A clever and practical solution to a problem that most of us has run into. Well done.
Re: Adding a drawer to a drawer
#4Yes, how to store spice jars so they can easily be seen is a challenge. I like your solution.
Re: Adding a drawer to a drawer
#5Added the sloped spice rack to the drawer today. The example my wife found from Home Depot indicated the slope piece was 5" wide, so I modeled mine on that. I wanted the slope of the piece to be higher than the approximate 2" in the example, so I went with 3" (arbritary on my part). That put the angle about 35*. The sloped piece was made from some left-over drawer bottom stock (1/4" plywood) and the riser was made with left-over drawer side stock (5/8" thick). We chose to not permanently attach the spice rack components until we see how they work out, also we chose not to put any finish on them at this time. There are 3 individual rows that are just laid side to side and kept from sliding to the back by a couple of stick at the back. A downside of this approach is that it cut down on the number of spice containers that now fit in the drawer. The remainder will be placed in the space under the drawer.