Natural Home: Lining Kitchen Drawers with Cork

I’m all about solving little nagging problems. The problem that has been bugging me for years (I never said I solved them in a timely manner!) is that the bottoms of some the drawers in my kitchen are getting all beat up. We remodeled our kitchen about fifteen years ago (I still think of it as the “new” kitchen), and I thought that I had banished the need for contact paper from my life forever. But alas, even new materials wear out.

I have complete contact paper aversion from years of apartment hopping in my twenties, so that was out. I tried that rubbery material that you can use to keep rugs from sliding around–but ironically, it just slid all over the place in my drawers.

Natural materials are more appealing to me and I think that cork will have a long life and I won’t have to replace it for many years. A few years ago, I bought some 12″ cork tiles in the stationery department–the kind that are meant to be use to create a quick and easy bulletin board. I just cut them up and put them in some of the smaller kitchen drawers and it works great. But, when I went back to get some more–they don’t carry them anymore. Well, they do, but now they are hexagon shaped.

A quick Amazon search revealed a solution I had never thought of: rolls of cork!

It was the easiest DIY ever! I simply emptied out the drawer. (Yikes!)

Then I measured and cut the roll of cork to size. It’s about 1/16″ thick, so it cuts easily.

Since it was rolled up, it wants to curl–so I used some double-sided tape to hold it in place. I think the weight of the utensils on top of it will help it to relax, and since it is one piece cut-to-size, I don’t think it will move around.

The project took all of ten minutes (why did I procrastinate so long?!). And I couldn’t be happier with the results. It’s the little things in life, right?!

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