Apartment Manager Adventures

Hello everyone,

Enforcer here. I think I have mentioned that I pretty much do all of the maintenance of this building, which varies greatly. I am amazed at the things that can go wrong in an apartment or house. It keeps me busy, that is for sure. One benefit to all these problems I see and fix in peoples apartments is that I have become very familiar with the common problems and over time become proficient at solving them. (I often have tenants comment on how I know exactly where to go and what to do to solve various problems) There are also a lot of little tricks I pick up here and there over time.

Looking at the searches people are using to find this site it appears that some of you are interested in learning to repair common household things, or may be interested in little tips that help things run a little more smoothly, so I’ve decided to start a new category on the site called “Quick Tips”. Within this category, I will be sharing the secrets and little things that you can do to make things in your home work better, or things you can do when working on common problems in the home to make the job easier.

So, today, my Quick Tip is involving any kind of wooden furniture that has drawers without wheels or rails in them. (The common, wood on wood slide out drawers.)

These drawers can often become stubborn and refuse to slide open and closed smoothly…

Please click below to read on…

So, any kind of wooden furniture can have problems caused by changes in humidity. School Teachers often experience this when their wooden desks swell slightly when all the kids are back in class and the humidity rises from all the people being in that room several hours a day. The wood swells slightly and sometimes because it is not as dry, and because things are a little more tight, the drawers will stick and are hard to open / close. Often, they wont smoothly slide either.

So here is the easy Quick Tip for stubborn drawers on wooden furniture: (This will only work on drawers similar to the ones pictured above. It wont work on drawers with metal tracks or rollers)

Take a bar of soap and just rub it along the bottom of each drawer where it comes in contact with the frame (you can do this on both the drawer and the frame) Don’t go overboard. You only need a little bit to solve your problem. The soap helps it slide easier, prevents the wood from sticking to each other, and also helps reduce the amount of humidity that part of the wood can absorb. You’ll soon be sliding your drawers open and closed with the greatest of ease! Just think of how impressed your friends will be!!? Eh?… okay, maybe it wont impress your friends, but hey, it will make life easier on you. right?

This same trick works on stubborn doors that rub on the door frame. Just look at where the door is rubbing on the frame, and apply the bar of soap there.

So, anyone else here done this? Or if you are about to try it, come back and use the comments section below to tell us how it worked for you. Also, feel free to ask questions about other types of repairs or fixes you would like to see on the site and it may become my next Quick Tip!

Thanks for reading, tell your friends about Apartment Manager Adventures!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Do It Yourself, Fixes, Maitenance, News, Quick Tips, Site Updates, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.