The main purpose of kitchen cabinets is to provide storage. Sure, they make a great design statement if you choose a good quality one from the Cabinetland showroom in Schaumburg, Illinois, and they last for a long time. However, kitchen cabinets alone are not always enough to store everything you have efficiently.
Cabinets come with optional features that you can add in your kitchen remodeling design, and most homeowners would not even know about them until they find themselves without a place to put some of their things. Here is the ultimate wishlist for kitchen cabinets.
Drawers
It may seem obvious, but you actually need to specify how many of your cabinets should come with drawers, and whether you want a set of drawers in lieu of a standard cabinet. Drawers are flexible and accessible places to store things, especially in the kitchen. Top drawers are particularly useful. Because they are at an easy height for looking down and finding things without needing to squat or bend. Simply pull them out and everything is right there for the taking.
Drawers can also hold many of the things you have in the kitchen, particularly the three-drawer stack. The top drawer is typically shallower, usually 6 inches, and the bottom two drawers are about 12 inches deep. You can put utensils, knives, and cutlery in the top drawer, and food, pots, pans, lids, baking sheets, and even small appliance sin the lower drawers. They are also a good way to keep your kitchen efficient and streamlined. Instead of opening a cabinet door and pulling as rollout to get something, you simply pull out a drawer. Drawers have clean lines that make any kitchen, whatever the style, look neat and attractive.
Trash units
All kitchens need a trash receptacle, but it doesn’t look seemly out in the open. Your beautiful new kitchen deserves to keep the trash out of sight, but still accessible. What you need is a trash cabinet, also known as a trash pull-out, where you can put your trash receptacles behind closed doors to keep it out of sight (and smell).
You can get a trash pull-out, or even a double, built right into the cabinets, and you can separate your recycled materials from other trash. A double unit takes up just 18 inches of space, and you can get one with a soft close to make it as pleasant as possible. Adding this feature to your new kitchen cabinets is definitely a smart move.
Dividers
Cabinet boxes can be as spacious as you want it, but some kitchen things need to be organized in a non-standard way. You can stack cookie sheets, cutting boards, pot lids, and racks one on top of each other, but it can be tedious pulling the one you need when you need it. It is more space efficient to store them vertically, which is where dividers come in.
Vertical dividers are usually put in the upper part of a tall cabinet, or the cabinet over a refrigerator or buil6tbuilt-in oven. Another good place to put them is in narrower base cabinets from 9 to 12 inches, which does not accommodate a drawer-stack too well.
Spice storage
Spice bottles are fiddly little things that can be difficult to organize in a typical cabinet, which is why a spice pull-out is a must in any respectable kitchen. You can put it in a wall cabinet so that you don’t have to store them one in front of the other, or stacked one on top of the other. It can be hard to find what you are looking for, and it is a waste of space.
The best type of spice pull-out is a 12-inch tiered one next to the cook top, where each spice bottle is easily accessible, no matter how many you have.
Corner pockets
Corners are usually awkward areas for kitchens, and inevitable for many of them because it is the point where two perpendicular base cabinets meet. Most cabinet makers offer corner cabinets to maximize the kitchen space, but they are deeper than other cabinets and difficult to access. You can make this space more functional by adding one of the following features.
Lazy Susan
This is a corner unit that turns 90 degrees on either side, and usually come in 36-inch sizes. It typically has twin carousels, and may or may not have a central pole to support them. The carousels go a full 360 degrees so you can see everything inside.
Blind corner
A blind corner cabinet projects out of one wall with a filler cabinet on the adjoining wall, and is often an option when a Lazy Susan is not possible or wanted, and can just be a space efficient if you have a unit that lets you pull out the shelves so you can see the contents.
Drawers
If you prefer not to have any moving parts to your corner storage, you can opt for drawers with L-shaped fronts, with a range of 39 to 45 degree angles. These work like regular drawers except for the angled fronts, and can be as much as 30inches deep when fully extended. This is a pricey option, but they can work really well.
Conclusion
All these options are available from the top brands in cabinetry. But, they represent added cost to your kitchen remodeling project. Storage space depends heavily on how you use your kitchen, so you need to give us some indications of what additional features you want with your new kitchen cabinets so we can work it in to your quote. Cabinet Land Kitchen and Beyond offers free consultation services and quotes, so you can have the benefit of our expertise without spending a dime.
We are a local remodeling company with a showroom located in Schaumburg, Illinois. We work only with the best cabinet brands at the best prices compared to our competitors such as Advance Cabinets and Handsome Cabinets.
Visit us today to see what we have to offer. We service Chicago land and have the expertise and resources to complete virtually any type of kitchen cabinets – ON TIME and ON BUDGET with top quality craftsmanship that will exceed your expectations.
