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The Best Way to Organize Your Kitchen

Clay Cox

Simply put…drawers, drawers and more drawers. Storage solutions are paramount on our customers’ minds these days as it should be in my opinion.

I wish I could say that it has always been this way but in fact it hasn’t. For example during the “Tuscany” year’s kitchen designs were all about over the top accents. During this era we worked with decorative corbels, fluted columns, turned legs and massive wood hoods some so large we called them mantles. Storage solutions were secondary to the design. Those days I’m happy to say are mostly in the past for us kitchen designers.

Let me give you an example of how easy drawers can be by using rollout shelves as an example. A rollout shelf was designed to make reaching that big pot in the back of your cabinet easier to get to. However, this process includes multiple steps. First you opened the cabinet doors. Then you pulled the shelf out. Next you removed the pot and pushed the shelf back in. Lastly you closed the doors. Now try getting that pot when it’s in a drawer. First you open the drawer. Then you remove the pot.Then you close the drawer. You’re done.

Organize your kitchen

Drawers can play a big part in aging in place as well. In the example above I think everyone can see that opening a drawer, lifting an item out and closing that drawer is as easy as it gets. And with the soft- close drawer features that practically close the drawers themselves it gets even better. How about some more ideas? Put your dishes and glasses in drawers. We have drawer accessories that keep them from banging into each other. How about putting your knives into a knife block drawer instead of on your counter? There are silverware drawers, spice drawers, cutlery drawers, utensil drawers, linen drawers and just big ole empty drawers to name but a few.

If you’re considering new fronts only for your kitchen cabinets I urge you to consider your storage solutions too. Unfortunately you can’t, in most cases, change your base cabinets to drawers so you’re stuck with whatever the builder put into your kitchen to begin with. I have never remodeled a kitchen with new cabinetry where I didn’t make a huge difference in storage and increasing the amount of drawers helped with that.

Please E-mail Clay with your questions or comments at clay@kitchensbyclay.com.

Enjoy your remodel,
Clay Cox