Laying Out Drawer Sizes: Why We Do It and How We Do It

The usual practice in cabinet manufacturing is to offer a few standard drawer configurations, often getting deeper toward the bottom of the cabinet.

One of the advantages of custom building is that there's no need to standardize. You and your customer can think through each drawer: what should go there, how much space it needs, and what dividers might be useful.

If you do this kind of planning, you'll often end up with more drawers, and maybe 15% to 25% greater storage capacity overall. It's also worth mentioning that big drawers are a good value in custom cabinets, because the labor in a wide drawer is about the same as in a smaller one.

For example, 3” is plenty for silver, but 3.5” is better for utensils.There's also no unbending requirement to put the biggest drawers at the bottom. You might decide that you have this heavy mixer you use a lot, which requires a 13” drawer. Maybe you want it in a top drawer so you don't have to bend down to pull it out.

Another factor is what we call the “optimum reach zone.” The top two drawers, the back of the counter, and the lower shelves on the wall are the absolutely best, most convenient, easiest-to-access storage. You don't have to be tall or have good knees to get at that stuff. So in planning drawers, we often put the most-used items in the upper one or two drawers. It saves a lot of needless walking, bending, and searching while cooking or cleaning up.

Of course, for regular readers of this blog, I don't have to mention the First Rule of Gilbrethian Ergonomic Design: Storage at point of first use! Whenever possible store things where you will be located when you need that thing. The things you use the most get the premium storage.

In Figure 1, the boxy top drawer in Cabinet F is for bottles of oils and sauced, right by the stove. To the left, two drawers for spices. These are constantly used items, stored right where they are used.

Figure 1 - Custom Drawer Sizes

Usually my customers and I work over these locations a number of times to get it right.

We start by figuring out what kind of drawer hardware they want. If we use side-mount Accuride, you'd have about 26” of capacity to distribute over 4 drawers. With those hidden softclose “Blumotion” drawers, you have more like 23”, because the hardware takes up space between drawers. With the less costly Blum Metabox drawer system, you get around 24”. In a three drawer stack, you get a little more.

I give people a little chart of typical depths of drawers for certain contents (Figure 2) as a starting point; their actual stuff may differ from these average drawer capacities.

Figure 2: Drawer Depth Chart

After we talk about it a while, we try to get a few key things located. Maybe knives, utensils, silverware, those tall bottles of oil, and so on. We take a set of elevations, and start to label what goes where. We're working toward a chart that shows the contents and depths of all the drawers in a given stack. Figure 3 is the chart for this bit of cabinetry.

Figure 3: Chart for Custom Cabinetry

This might seem confusing. But it's pretty easy, fun, and definitely worth it. Getting specific in this way often introduces a little visual variety to how the kitchen looks.

In the shop it might seem very difficult to be constantly changing your layout for hanging drawers hardware. But we make a little template stick for each bank of drawers. The stick is the height of the cabinet, and shows all the relevant clearances and dimensions. We use it for every step of the cabinetmaking process. It's not really extra work, and the results are much better.

Ian Maas using a Template Stick while creating custom cabinetry at the SCD Shop

The Dreaded Inside Corner Problem, or, Thanks Josette

On most projects, the issue of how best to access the inside corner comes up. That four square feet of area is mediocre storage, awkward at best, but people can't bear to see it wasted.

This is no problem if there is an outside access to the space. Just face the door or drawer cabinet to the outside. But that isn't always possible.

Outside Access to Corner Cabinet

Solutions that don't work:

The classic solution is the Lazy Susan. Usually, as the diagram shows, the Lazy Susan is three feet in diameter and has two shelves that spin around. Seems like a good idea.

Classic Lazy Susan Corner Cabinet

Of course, you lose the corners. To recover the remainder, you sacrifice a 12” adjacent space, prime storage. With two tiers, you get about 1350 square inches of shelf area.

Rev-a-shelf and other companies such as Hafele make “blind corner” units that are designed to solve the problem of wasting the adjacent space to reclaim the corner. You can see these on the web under “blind corner” storage. This is like a little train. When you pull out the storage in the adjacent cabinet, the inside corner follows it out like a little trailer. These are clever, but expensive, and you are still talking about 2 levels of storage. The ones I've seen cost $700 to $1,000. 

Perhaps that money could be spent elsewhere to better account.

Solutions that do work:

There's no one right solution; usually other factors in the design will influence what you do at the inside corner.

A simple, classic and inexpensive solution is sometimes referred to as a blind corner cab. 

Blind Corner Cabinet

Basically it's just a door cabinet at the corner where the shelves extend into the inside corner. Not a terrible solution, but to get to that interior you are down on your knees reaching back in the dark.

A variation on this is a bi-fold door at the corner. It's a little easier to use than a single door.

Bi-fold Corner Door, Stu Schaffner photo

Counter intuitively, sometimes it is better to just abandon the inside corner, and maximize the use of the adjacent spaces with wide drawers. 

Wide Kitchen Drawers. Stu Schaffner photo

It looks wasteful, but you come out ahead because the drawers give you densely packed, easy to see and retrieve storage. And there are three or four layers of it instead of two. Instead of the lazy susan's 1300 square inches of shelf, you have more like 1600 square inches with four drawers there. An interesting point is that you don't have to build any added cabinets; you are just making the adjacent ones wider.

Here's a solution suggested by our customer Josette Silvers: a stack of wicker baskets that just sit on shelves. 

Corner Baskets

This is nice storage for foods like onions or garlic that like a little air, or for cloths or certain dishes, etc. The clever part is that on each shelf there is a second basket tucked into the inside corner.

This solution is so elegant and simple. It gets you some of the inside corner in a clever and economical way. It adds variety and visual interest, but is also practical.

It's pretty easy to come up with a solution that's complex and expensive. But one that solves a problem well in such a simple way is to me the essense of good design.

Thanks Josette.