Kitchen Storage Hacks: Little Upgrades, Big Payoff
July 03, 2018Getting the most out of your existing storage can mean big savings for your kitchen remodeling budget. Improving access to what you already have means that you can skip building new cabinets, or even an addition. For many people, there isn’t room for building more storage space in either their budgets or their homes! Thankfully, anyone can reclaim “lost” space using either or both of these simple upgrades. And they both revolve around the same piece of hardware: slides.
Slides are the mechanism that lets your kitchen drawers slide out, and they’re how rollout shelves work as well. Basic slides open drawers and rollouts only partially, allowing us to access the back, with some bending and reaching on our part. A simple but incredibly valuable upgrade is replacing them with “full extension” slides. These “full extension” slides are actually capable of FULLY opening, so that we can see and reach clear to the back without bending and squinting. Test yours to see how far they extend, and how much of your drawers stay out of sight (and out of mind).
This simple hardware upgrade multiplies how much ACCESS you have to the space already in your kitchen. The size of the box stays the same; what changes is how much you can use that space. Instead of only seeing part of what’s inside when it’s open, the whole drawerbox rolls all the way out. Rolling so far out that the back of the drawer is even with the front of the cabinets means that the entirety of the contents are visible from above.
This eliminates the murky area at the back of the drawer where objects get lost through simply not being able to see them. That’s three or more inches of drawer space back; space you already had but couldn’t use. That might not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. Three inches in one drawer is enough for another bin for utensils or pens. Add up the savings across multiple drawers, and you might get a whole drawer’s worth or more of “lost” space back!
Better yet, you can use this hack on more than just drawers! Rollout shelves are another way of reclaiming the tons of lost space in base cabinets, and will get their own post in the future. They can transform deep, hard-to-navigate base cabinets into organized storage. In pantries, they bring deep dark shelves into easy reach. This is done by taking the shelf and mounting it on slides, letting the whole shelf glide forward into easy view and reach. Roll outs themselves are a valuable upgrade, even with standard slides. Adding full extension slides here means even the farthest back of a shelf or cabinet will be easy to see and reach; not just the front row. That’s double the reclaimed “lost space”!
So say goodbye to the wasted space at the back of your drawers and cabinets and hello to getting the most out of your storage with full extension slides for your drawers and rollouts. How much “lost” space could you reclaim if you started using ALL of your cabinets?
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