How To Organize Your Kitchen
The kitchen is usually the most used area in any home yet is the most unorganized area. Look in most kitchens and you will find that to access items in the base cabinets or pantries, things have to be moved aside to find a certain item. I have watched people dig through their kitchen cabinets looking for a sauce pan that was used just a week ago or through the pantry cabinets looking for a spice jar that was hiding behind cereal boxes.
The problem with most kitchen and pantry cabinets is that they are not very functional for everyday life. They are big, deep, dark cabinets with boards for shelves. A typical base kitchen cabinet is two feet deep and you will usually have to crouch down to see into the back of them.
We believe that everyone wants an organized kitchen but the initial cost of organizational products prohibit having cabinets with pull out shelves and organizers. A typical pull out shelf from the cabinet manufacturer will cost approximately $75.00, multiply that by the typical kitchen of 10 cabinets with two shelves and just to have pull out shelves in every cabinet can add $1500.00 to the kitchen cabinet order and if you have pantry cabinets, that amount can almost double.
Why not start out with installing pull out, slide out, roll out shelves and trays ( all describe the same thing ) in the cabinets that you use most. These cabinets are usually the ones closest to your oven or stove. These have the items that you use most for cooking and are typically crammed.
If your cabinets are large enough to spread your cooking utensils like fry pans out and can be stacked in two layers,consider a pull out tray. A kitchen cabinet pull out tray will be 1 1/2- 2 1/2″ tall and will allow you to stack two items without them tipping out. By installing pull out trays in these cabinets, you can easy access to the most used cooking utensils.
A kitchen cabinet that holds taller items such as liquor bottles, cleaning bottles, paper towel rolls, or that needs to have items stacked three layers high or more, consider a pull out shelf or drawer. These kitchen cabinet pull out shelves are typically 3 1/2″ tall or more. The higher sidewall of these pull out shelves will help to prevent the items from falling off when the shelf is slid out of the cabinet.
I will get into pantry cabinets, spice racks and pull out trash cans in a later entry.
see how to measure for pull out shelves http://www.slideoutshelvesllc.com/general/measuring-how-to.html