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Kitchen Cabinet Appliance Storage Ideas

November 7th, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

When designing your kitchen it’s nice to have specific places for the small appliances to go. I’m going to share a few ideas of ways to design kitchen cabinets for toasters, blenders, mixers, coffee pots and microwaves. My personal opinion is that many of these items should be kept out of site.

Designing special storage areas for small appliances is something that is going to have to be worked on prior to renovating the cabinets. The main reason is that electrical outlets will need to be located in certain places in order for these ideas to work properly.

Let’s Start With The Kitchen Cabinet Appliance Garage

This particular cabinet design is related to the roll top desk idea. It can be referred to as a tambour door unit, an appliance garage or a rolling door cabinet.


In any event the idea is for the small appliances to he hidden inside of the tambour unit. The look of this particular design includes multiple thin strips of wood that are glued to a canvas piece of cloth. This is what is used for the appliance garage door. The door then fits into a grove on either side of the cabinet which acts as a guide for its operation.

Tip: Many of the pre-fab cabinets that get purchased from home centers have plastic tracks that the doors slide in. These are items that always present problems down the road. If you can find a design that has an actual groove cut into real wood for the appliance garage door to slide in, this is the most durable design.

It’s important to have electrical outlets inside of the cabinets to plug the toaster, blender or coffee pot into inside of the storage area. This is why you need to have a working design plan prior to installing the cupboards. An electrician can wire the necessary outlets that are needed inside of the small appliance storage area.

Basically there are two ideas for the design of a roll top appliance garage. One that sits across the corner and the other is having one that is straight.

Tip: If you are working with a custom fabrication company, consider having your upper cabinetry built extra deep. This way the appliance cabinet can be extra deep as well.

One of the most functional appliance cabinets I ever made incorporated the owner’s ideas to have it be deeper than normal and four feet wide. This required that I build two separate units that were twenty four inches wide each. The customer liked his ideas so much that after they were installed, he requested that we build two more in his kitchen.

A word of caution, it is always a good idea to unplug the appliances when they are put inside of the cabinet and the roll top tambour door is closed. Years ago someone closed the door on a toaster and a fire was started.

Open shelf upper cabinets work well for toaster ovens and free standing microwave ovens. Because uppers are only twelve inches in depth cabinet manufactures came up with a couple of ideas for these small appliance storage areas that will allow them to work. They will either supply a shelf that gets screwed into the cabinet after it is installed which is extra deep or the cabinet will be made deeper. If it’s deeper, the cupboard must be finished on the sides because it will extend out deeper than the wall cabinets beside it.

Kitchen cabinets always have a much nicer appearance when the appliances are stored behind cabinet doors. These are the most common ideas that kitchen cabinet designers will offer for providing storage areas for your small appliances.

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