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veggirl123

How to fit a double garbage (full size) pullout in a 15" Ikea cabinet

Lisa
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago

This is a hack, and not in the best sense of the word. This solution is not perfect, but I do know that people have asked over the years how to get two cans in a 15" Ikea pullout. Ideally you should use an 18" cabinet for 2 full size garbage bins to fit nicely. Some people have found smaller trash bins that will fit fully in the 15" cabinet, but all that I've seen are either really short, or square. I wanted 2 regular sized waste bins. One for trash and one for recycling.

We did not have the option to use 18" cabinet, so we came up with this solution 3 years ago. I posted about it at that time and people still ask about it on occasion, so I wanted to document more clearly what we did exactly to make it work.

We had 2 Rev-a-Shelf trash bins from original kitchen that were in great condition. I am not 100% positive, but pretty sure that these are the bins we have: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005CXF8DY

They were just a little bit too big to fit in the pull out. The bottoms wouldn't sit on the floor because of the sloped Ikea drawers. And the rim of the trash cans would not fit inside of the cabinet. We decided to cut off the rim of the trash cans and see if they would fit. They did - barely, but they fit. (See picture)



That solved one problem. We could get two cans in the cabinet drawer, but they flopped around because they were not sitting on the floor. To solve that issue we cut a piece of clear lexan to fit in the drawer above the rails. Then we cut out square holes for the garbage cans to sit in. This stabilized them and they stopped flopping around.

I don't have a picture of that, but if you look at the picture on this link, you can see our original template that we made for the holes (the brown cardboard material at bottom of photo.)

https://st.hzcdn.com/simgs/6d52ef300881539c_9-0617/home-design.jpg

That worked pretty well, but I recently decided it was too messy. Lexan is clear, and dirt was getting underneath this ledge but I couldn't clean it without unscrewing the whole thing and taking it off. So we have cut down our template to just one strip of lexan in between the two garbage cans. That seems to be enough to keep the cans stable, even though they are not touching bottom of drawer.



One final picture will show you what I mean about it not touching the bottom. There is a good 1.5" between bottom of the bin and the drawer itself.



We've been using this solution for 3 years, and the cans are still holding up perfectly. Sometimes some garbage ends up on the floor of the drawer, but it is usually little crumbs and I just vacuum it up when I take the garbage out with my hand-held. I would have preferred 18" for the garbage, but this is working for us, and I'm very happy to have two full sized bins in the cabinet.

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