When you are considering designing your kitchen from the scratch or revamping it, you should always keep roll-out kitchen shelves in the back of your mind. These shelves would complement your thought of giving a new look to your kitchen.
Installing roll-out shelves has many benefits,four of which are mentioned below.
No Modification Required – Many people have a misconception that installing roll-out shelves requires modification of kitchen cabinet. On the contrary, these shelves can be such designed that they fit cabinet dimensions.
Safety – Though this doesn’t happen often, but there have been instances when people have hurt themselves trying to reach out to a particular item kept in a typical non-roll-out shelf. However, with the roll-out mechanism in place, these shelves allow you easy access to items without exposing yourself to bodily harm.
Value For Money – Roll-out shelves have become quite a desirable accessory for kitchen as they allow greater convenience. They are now seen as an additional selling feature of a home.
With these benefits, roll-out kitchen shelves can be taken as a great addition to your kitchen,allowing not only greater storage space but ease of access as well.
FACT: When you install pull out drawers, you will LOSE some shelf space.
FACT: When you install pull out drawers, you will GAIN ease of access to everything behind the 1st row of your shelf.
Each side wall of a pull out drawer is usually ½” thick…so, you lose 1″ of potential shelf width just there. In addition, a pull out drawer requires clearance from cabinet walls and hinges on both sides. If you have a ½” hinge and 1/4″ clearance on each side…that is another 1″ of shelf width lost. The width of our pull out drawers is EXACTLY the stated size…so a 15″ drawer is EXACTLY 15″ wide…outside dimension. Our side walls are ½” thick, so the inside width at the bottom of the drawer is 1″ less than the stated size.
Standard shelves are 22″ deep. You don’t want your rollout drawer hitting the back of the cabinet every time you roll the drawer back into the cabinet…so a maximum sized drawer should be slightly less. Our pull out drawers are all 21 5/8″ deep. Again deducting the width of the front and back walls of the drawer, you are left with 19 ½” of depth of drawer bottom to place items on.
One situation in particular, you may want to think about more deeply. If you have double door Face Frame cabinets…you have a vertical bar in the middle of a full double width shelf. You may be storing some items partially behind the vertical bar…e.g. a rice cooker…and maybe it is not inconvenient to remove the item behind the vertical bar. By placing pull out drawers on both sides of the vertical bar, you will lose all that storage space behind the vertical bar.
But think of what you gain. You could use a foot to open our pull out drawer…you could use a cane…or you could use your hand. And voila!…everything in the drawer is right there in front of you. Pull the item you want out…and roll the drawer back in. How convenient is that!
A couple of more things to think about when retrofitting existing kitchen cabinets or pantries.
There are two major cabinet construction styles…Face Frame and Euro. How do you tell which style you have? Go to a double door cabinet and open both doors. If there is a vertical bar between the doors, you have Face Frame…no vertical bar, you have Euro cabinets.
The implications? With Euro cabinets, you can install a single large drawer…the width of the full double shelf. With face Frame, you are restricted to narrower drawers…roughly the width of a single door…with one caveat. You can cut out the vertical post…thus giving you a double wide shelf…but this is best left to professionals. Translation…higher costs to you to convert…but doable.
Cabinet makers typically make standard sized cabinet modules…and then piece a series of modules together on the jobsite to fit a given length wall. Standard cabinet modules come in 3″ (outside dimension) increments from 12″ to 48″. The standard depth for kitchen cabinets is 24″…for bathroom vanities 20″. So, to maximize the usable shelf space in your cabinets, the drawer depth should be just slightly less the cabinet depth.
A third cabinet situation is that of custom cabinets. They can be either Face Frame or Euro, but not standard depth or width. This is often the situation with islands and pantries. To get a tight drawer fit with custom cabinets requires buying custom drawers…which again implies higher costs. Caution…If you give the manufacturer the drawer measurements…and you make a mistake…you own it.
Just some examples of how your cabinet style can impact the selection of sliding shelves when retrofitting your cabinets.
You’ve made your decision…you want roll out drawers in your kitchen. You know there are many pull out shelf providers…and most of their offerings differ. So, what are some of the factors you should consider before deciding which provider you choose? Here are a few to think about:
1. What Style are Your kitchen Cabinets?
2. The Shelf Space vs Ease of Access Trade-off
3. Pull Out Drawer Materials
4. Drawer Basket Considerations
5. Drawer Slide Considerations
6. Standard or Customs Sizes?
7. Drawer Load Capacity
8. Installation – Can I do it Myself?
9. What if I Make a Mistake – Are Returns Easy?
10. Guarantee provided?
11. Putting it All Together
We will discuss each of these topics in future Blogs…stay tuned.
When a drawer is screwed to a shelf and then rolled out, it acts like a lever on the shelf…pushing down on the front of the shelf pulling up on the back of the shelf. If you have 40 lbs in the drawer, roughly 40 lbs is pushing down on the front of your shelf…and 40 lbs is pulling up on the back of your shelf. If you attach the drawer to a floating shelf, the drawer and the shelf, being one, will tip towards you…likely emptying the contents of the drawer onto your lap!
To prevent a floating shelf from tipping, the shelf must be secured by attaching a couple ‘L’ brackets or a strip of wood on top of the shelf at the back, and ensuring they are screwed into the back of the cabinet.