Kitchen Cabinet Tweaks

I am getting older. No doubt about it. I positively hate getting down on my hands and knees to get something out of my lower cabinets.

Just a couple of weeks ago I broke a Corning Ware Spice Of Life casserole dish that had been a wedding gift forty years ago. I used it several times a week at least and the inside was still shiny, the surface like new. I cannot complain considering how much use I got of out of it, but I was still sad to see it go four decades later. It just slipped out of my hands onto a nested stack of similar casserole dishes while I was getting it out of the cabinet.

So, at a recent home show Frank and I attended, we ran across a company called Shelves2Drawers. Because of my recent dropping incident and to save my knees and back, we hired them to convert two of our under the counter cabinets to have pull out trays so items are more accessible. Here are the cabinets to be modified. Maybe I should have taken a photo before emptying them. I did not, but here is the next best thing.

Spread out on the dining room table is everything I took out of those cabinets in order to have drawers installed. That dining room table is 104" long by 42" wide.

I would be hard pressed to get it all back in as it was. But there was no real need to memorialize that mess for posterity since I had no plans to replicate it. With the pullout system I knew I would lose some volume due to drawer hardware and clearances but I was also confident I would gain accessibility by not having to stack as many items so deeply. Everything to the left of that roll of white contact paper had been in the cabinet on the left. I never used those pretty red casserole dishes on the far left because I had to move so much other stuff to get to them. They were stacked so deep that lifting the pile of heavy ceramics while on my hands and knees was problematic.

Here is the left cabinet with the pull out trays installed. It has three shallow drawers of equal depth so I do not have to stack items so many high.

My casserole dishes are now easily accessible on the top shelf. I will probably do a bit of tweaking and move the Corning Ware over there also. The side slider tracks are sufficiently stout and have enough overlap that additional cantilevered weight will not be an issue.

My baking pans are on the second pullout drawer.

The bottom drawer has broiler pans, sheet liners, and other baking and roasting miscellanea, easy to see and fetch.

Yes, I did get rid of some items, our coffee maker and waffle maker in the left foreground of the next photo to name a couple.

Frank and I never drink coffee. When we have guests over I tell them ahead of time that we offer instant coffee bags or serve tea. The die hard caffeine addicts prefer to zot down a couple blocks to Starbucks for a foofy coffee-ish beverage anyway.

I also gave away our combination waffle / grilled cheese sandwich maker. The first three or four waffles always stick in all the crevices with a very frustrating consistency. Does this look familiar to anyone? The typical requests from overnight guests is usually for my pancakes for breakfast instead.

Also, I never used the flat side for grilled cheese sandwiches, preferring the stovetop griddle that makes several at once. And, please, please, do not anyone give me a panini maker to replace it! The occasional sandwich at Panera Bread is perfectly fine, thank you. And when I go there, as an added bonus, I am more inclined to order the healthier choice of a soup and salad.

The under counter cabinet on the right has two drawers of two different deeper depths to give a bit more flexibility.

For now I have all my pans on the upper drawer. I moved them from another cabinet I had to crawl into to retrieve them. I like that they are consolidated in one place and easier to grab.  Moving those pans vacated room for all those tall, deep, cookie tins that I use only at Christmas so it was a good space trade.

I stored serving trays and decorative dishes on the lower drawer. Now I will not need to stand on a chair to retrieve them from a high cabinet when we have company over. Heck, I might even start using that pretty acrylic salad bowl more often for Frank and me since it will be easier to grab it.

I also do not know why I was storing a foot high stack of cork plant coasters, four ceramic plant pots, and a huge plastic container for potting soil (nearly empty, by the way) underneath those cabinets. I used to have more potted plants on either side of the sink but I have simplified my life by no longer caring for straggly half-dead attempts at lush greenery. I have granted myself more easily wipeable vacant kitchen counter space as a preferable alternative.

We had this house custom built in 1988 and were lucky (maybe skilled?) enough to get most of it right. Needs do change though and I am anticipating that these cabinet additions will certainly add ease and functionality. Getting rid of some unused items is nothing to sneeze at either!