Fix for a Tipping Dresser in Kids Room

The addition of shims & L brackets makes these dressers safer for kids.

Recently Vicki purchased & made over a couple of used dressers for use in the grandsons’ room. The two-year-old doing what two-year-olds do quickly figured out how to open the drawers & almost had one of the dressers fall on him. A quick fix was needed to secure these falling hazards. 

There are commercially available furniture straps to prevent tipping/falling, but a search of four stores including the big box hardware stores revealed nothing available. These needed to be secured now & there was no time to order online. 

Here's link to a post about furniture safety from Ikea.

This is our fix:

Materials/Tools:

• Wood or composite shims
  
• L-brackets (aka corner brace)
  
• Screws—we used Walldog screws for the drywall & the screws that came in the RubberMaid FastTrack package for the studs
  
• Small 3/4” wood screws were used in the dresser top
  
• Drill/bits
  
• Magnetic Stud finder (order online—it’s the best one around--see demonstration)

Shims under the dressers--firsts step in making these safer from tipping.

We started by placing three sets of shims under each dresser making the front a bit higher than the back. This helped the dresser to tip less easily but with these dressers securing to the wall was absolutely necessary.

We tried to secure the L-bracket to wall studs where we could. We used two L-brackets per dresser. A bracket on each dresser was secured to a stud & the other through the dry wall with a Walldog screw. We drilled holes first for all the screw placement including the top of the dressers. If these were heirloom dressers, we would have found a less obvious place to place the L-bracket on the dresser, but these are not & right now it’s all about safety.

We tested the brackets by opening all the drawers to see if more work was needed. The dressers held in place well!

L brackets in place.