Using Stock Cabinets in Your Kitchen Design

!±8± Using Stock Cabinets in Your Kitchen Design

Any time you can keep your selections to stock sizes and items, you go a long way towards keeping the cost of your project down. So it is a good idea to know what the stock sizes are as you are designing your space. Standard lengths for plywood and melamine cabinets are 8' and 12' in a 4' width. Keep these dimensions in mind as you create your design.

While you can always have some special, custom additions made to your cabinets by the manufacturer, you may be able to start with a standard cabinet and simply have a local cabinet maker do some after market work on your cabinets to make them look custom without paying the full custom price.

Kitchen cabinets are normally 12" deep and the bottom cabinets are usually 24" deep. Generally you will not run into a problem with these two dimensions. The challenge comes when you are fitting the width of your cabinet. Cabinets come in 1' increments, and as luck would have it, your kitchen space may not be a measurement that is evenly divisible by one-foot increments. As a result, you may end up with a small pocket of odd space that you need to deal with if you are using stock cabinets in your kitchen.

Best Ideas for a Floor Plan

To design your cabinets get some ¼ inch graph paper and draw a detailed floor plan. You can use a 1-inch to 1-foot scale. Draw the perimeter of your kitchen to scale on the graph paper. Then mark all of the openings into the room like windows and doors. Do not include the current cabinets in your drawing, but you may want to mark where the refrigerator and sink go unless you are planning to move your plumbing. You may want to mark where your stove is as well if redoing the venting is a big deal. Generally redoing the wiring for a stove is not a big deal, but redoing the venting may be.

Now make some stock size cabinets out of paper cutouts. Make a variety of standard size cutouts so that you can move them around the kitchen to find which configuration works best. You may also want to have a cutout for your refrigerator and stove to add to the mix.

Now that you have your design grid ready to go, there are some things that you want to consider as you create your design.

o Do not put drawers in a corner. If you do, the space beside the drawers will just be dead space. It would be a better option to put two cabinets side by side in a corner, because you can modify a stock cabinet and add an opening in the side so you can access the corner space. This modification will not show once the cabinets are assembled.
o Do not place your stove in a corner. Even if you have counter space on either side of the corner, the cupboard beside the stove will be useless.
o Keep corner cabinets at least 18 inches. Any narrower, and you will create a cabinet that is too narrow to use.
o Allow adequate drawer space. If you are in doubt add more drawers than you think you will need. While it is great to have just enough drawers for silverware and stirring spoons, you will want a place to keep your other kitchen essentials like tin foil, rubber bands, pot holders and dish towels.
o Add a lazy Susan to your corner. Adding a turntable to your corner spaces will let you use them more efficiently.
o Use common sense. You refrigerator keeps food cold, and your stove and oven heats food. Do not put them right next to each other. You will just make your refrigerator work harder to do its job, and you will wear it out faster. You might also want to consider what this brainstorm would cost you in higher utility bills.

Whenever you design a kitchen you want to keep the efficient food prep triangle in mind. This is a pattern formed by you refrigerator, sink and stove. If you have to put all of these spaces on a single wall try to have your sink in the middle.

After you settle on the configuration of your bottom cabinets, then you can decide where your upper cabinets will go. Now instead of a floor plan style layout, you will want to look at the elevation view of your room. This view shows the walls of your room to scale. It shows all of the window and door openings, and shows the height and width of each. We are not concerned about depth in this drawing; your goal is to mark the height of all the base cabinets. Stock base cabinets are generally 34 ½" high which allows your countertop to be about 36" from the ground.

First, mark out your refrigerator, and draw a line around your room. This is the level of the bottom of your upper cabinets. Your regular wall cabinets will be 18" over the countertop or 54" from the floor. If you prefer, you can always mount your cabinets 16" over the counter to help you reach the second shelf more easily.

Once you can see how the elevation view of your new cabinets will look, go back to your floor layout, and mark a 12" line to indicate the depth of the upper cabinets wherever you plan to mount an upper cabinet.

If you make paper scale cutouts of your cabinets from the elevation view, you can line them up on your elevation drawing to see how they look. In particular you want to notice how the vertical lines of the doors line up. Even if the lines between the upper and lower cabinets do not match completely, you want to make sure that they create an aesthetically appealing pattern and do not look disjointed. Move your paper cutouts around to see what patterns are the most appealing before deciding on your final cabinet placement.

After you have moved your paper cutouts around and settled on your cabinet configuration, you will have a really clear understanding of how they will look in your kitchen.