Designing Kitchen Cabinets

When you are designing the layout of your kitchen cabinets the most important thing to consider is how many drawers will there be? This certainly applies to large, medium and small design layouts. It doesn’t matter if your building high-in or bottom of the line cabinetry, don’t try to save money by eliminating drawers.

There are other things of importance such as where will you put the trash can? Is there enough counter space near the stove or refrigerator? Should you opt to have a high breakfast bar or one at normal height? What kind of doors should we get, wood, Thermofoil cabinet doors or mica? Should there be glass door cabinets? IF so should the glass be clear or opaque?

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The questions that have to be addressed seem to be endless in the beginning designing stages.


These are all important question, but I always ask my customers how many drawers would you like to have and what do you want to put in them?

I have been hired to install cabinetry pull-out drawers in existing kitchens so many times after the fact. One common thread among customers who neglected to install them in the original kitchen design is that they ask the question: “why don’t kitchen cabinets just come equipped with a lot of them?”

My response is generally the same, “because drawers cost extra.” You see it seems that people would rather spend money on having the nice look on the outside and sacrifice functionality and convince. Somehow we must keep up with the “Joneses” down the street.

There is nothing worse to me than having to stop down and reach all the way into the back of a base cabinet to get a pot or pan that is buried among the pile. If those pots were inside a large drawer having extra heavy-duty full extension drawer slides, they would be so much easier to access.

I am more of a practical thinker as it relates to functionality instead of being overly concerned about ascetics.

Many kitchen design decisions are based upon how much time someone actually spends in the kitchen.

I’m here to encourage you, when designing kitchen cabinets, incorporate as many drawers as you can into the layout; Especially, if you or anyone else in the family has back problems.

Should I get regular drawers or roll-outs?

My personal take on this question is that designing your work space with regular ones is more efficient than having pull-outs. Here’s why. Roll-out shelves always are behind the kitchen cabinet doors; so, it’s a two part operation when you want to get something out of them. One of my favorite pantry cabinet designs is to include them from the bottom up to about five feet high.

Is it good to have drawers in the pantry?

If you can swing the budget to include them in the pantry cabinet design by all means get them. I have always built custom cabinetry so my customers would take extra time when designing the heights of the drawers in this area to accommodate their needs. Some might be for cereal type boxes and another designed to store canned goods.

I think you get the point, in the kitchen I believe your first consideration when you start designing the cabinets is to really think about how many drawers should be in the layout. Here’s another thing I do, I make my pull-outs higher than four inches. Those little things just seem like such a waste of space. Make sure that later down the road you don’t say: “I knew we should have made more drawers when we were designing the cabinets in our kitchen. Honey call the cabinet guy.”