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Organizing Your Kitchen - Cabinet  Shelving Accessories

You don’t have to be an organized person to have an organized kitchen. The right interiors and shelving accessories can do most of the work for you.

Spending some time up front thinking about how you use your kitchen and what space and storage needs you have can save you time not only during the installation of your new kitchen but also during the preparations for your first dinner party in the new space.

With a little planning now, you won’t have to think twice about where to find the ice tongs or the corkscrew. Consider everything that’s in your kitchen now and where you would put it in your newly configured space. Note on your new-kitchen blueprint what you plan to store in each cabinet and drawer.

Don’t be content with just adding rollout shelves in your base cabinets. Check out the growing number of options for how to make drawers give you more storage space. They’re being used now to store plates, pots and pans, and snacks—not to mention all the appliances, including refrigerators, wine chillers, and dishwashers, that now come as drawer units.

You can also gain storage space with the narrow, 4-inch-to-10-inch wide slide-in shelves that look like posts when they’re pushed in. They can give you extra room without taking up whole sections of the cabinets. They can hold spices or soups by the range, cleaning supplies by the sink, or wine bottles by the glassware.

And remember that the standard dimensions for cabinets are becoming less and less so. Find out from your designer or cabinetmaker how much you can push it. Maybe you can add 6 inches of storage to your base cabinets, making them 30 inches instead of the standard 24 inches deep. Or you could make your upper cabinets a foot taller and add 3 to 4 inches to their standard 12- to 13-inch depth.

Your options for storage solutions include:

Shelves

• Rollout shelves
• Foldout banks of shelves
• Swingout shelves

Baskets

• Pullout wire baskets
• Under-the-sink pullout wire baskets

Bins

• Pullout trash and recycling bins
• Trash receptacles under butcher blocks with cutout holes
• Grain storage bins

Drawer dividers

• Cutlery compartments
• Spice drawers
• Utensil dividers

Other

• Tilt-out panel in front of sink
• Lazy Susan shelving
• Corner wall cabinet with open shelving
• Diagonal wall cabinet with rotary shelves
• A spice door rack
• Vertical slots for trays and baking sheets
• Open shelving for decorative or commonly used items
• Under-cabinet wine rack
• Plate rack over sink