We Tried The Pool Noodle Hack To Keep Drawer Organizers In Place And One Word: Genius
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While drawer organizers are great, they can have one fatal flaw: If they don't fit perfectly, they could shift every time you open or close the drawer. Perhaps you've experienced this before, and every time you open that drawer, it takes a few seconds to place the organizers back where they belong. Luckily, you don't have to do this anymore, as there's an easy way to fix this problem.
If you often read our articles here at House Digest, you've probably seen that a certain summertime item can be used for a large number of random DIYs: A pool noodle. This item could be currently stored in your pool storage bin, ready to be cut to fit between the edge of your drawer organizer and the back of your drawer. To perform this hack, you'd simply place the pool noodle in the gap, which should keep your organizer snugly in place. Because we've had our fair share of imperfectly-sized organizers, we wanted to try this inexpensive hack out for ourselves to see if it came with any hidden downsides.
Gathering the materials
All you need to complete this hack is a pool noodle and something to cut it with. While we used scissors, an X-Acto knife, which you could buy on Amazon for $5.95, may be a better tool to use. This is because it will give you a cleaner cut and may also be safer. The pool noodle we used was purchased from Walmart for $3.48 and was from the Big Joe brand. This type was extra thick, but a regular pool noodle would also work.
We decided to test this out on our silverware drawer in our kitchen, which contains an organizer from the OXO brand, sold on Amazon for $16.99. The organizer can expand to fit a larger drawer, but because our space is quite small, we kept it in the narrow setting. While this organizer fits perfectly from left to right, unfortunately, there's a small gap behind it at the back of the drawer. Because of this, it always slides towards the back of the drawer, even though it's grippy on the bottom, which forces us to move it back to the front every so often. We wanted to see if this could be avoided just by placing a small piece of the pool noodle behind the organizer to fill in the gap.
Testing the hack in our silverware drawer
The first step to this hack is measuring the space you want to fill, so that you can cut your pool noodle down to the correct size. Because we couldn't reach the back of the drawer while the organizer was in position, we pushed the organizer to the back of the drawer in order to measure from the front. Luckily, the measurement doesn't need to be exact, so we cut it a little smaller than it needed to be. We also discovered that the width of the extra large pool noodle was perfect for the space we needed to fill, but if this ends up not being the case for you, you could cut it longwise as well.
To place the pool noodle into the drawer correctly, we had to remove the organizer completely and push the noodle to the back. Once the organizer was back in place, the noodle wasn't visible at all. This was a huge plus, since this pool toy isn't the most chic item to display in the silverware drawer. And, because the noodle fit snugly between the edge of our organizer and the back of the drawer, it kept our organizer from moving at all, no matter how forcefully or how many times the drawer was opened and closed.
Should you try this in your drawers?
In our opinion, even though this pool noodle hack may seem ridiculous, it's also pretty genius. It's inexpensive, easy to execute, and takes as little as 5 minutes to complete. However, there is one caveat that we think is important to point out: This hack is really only beneficial if you need to fill a space that isn't visible like it was in our case.
This is because if there's so much space in the back of your drawer that you can visibly see the pool noodle, it may be better to fill the area with another organizer or other items since placing the pool noodle there would be a waste of space. Further, it can also look silly to have pieces of a pool noodle inside your kitchen drawer. If you're worried about the appearance, but you still want to use this hack, a pool noodle in a neutral color like white or black may give your drawer a more aesthetically pleasing appearance.