Adequate width for kitchen drawers

[Roger Jensen]

I am building some cabinet bases to go on either side of our oven. Here is a drawing:

The cabinets on either side of the oven are 18 inches wide. After allowing for the face frames (I'm using inset faces for the drawers), the drawers are going to be a little less than 15 inches wide.

I'm worried the drawers aren't wide enough, but I don't have a feel for what would be appropriate dimensions for drawers.

Are there any rules of thumb I should follow for these drawers.

Thanks,

Roger

[Jamie Buxton]

I've built kitchen drawer banks as narrow as six inches. They work. You can put long narrow stuff in them -- cooking utensils, rolling pins, rolls of wax paper or aluminum foil or paper towels, and the like.

Of course, if you're really concerned about packing the maximum storage space into a compact kitchen, don't use face frames. Go frameless. It will give you several more inches of width in the drawers.

[Ed Peters]

someone else has been bitten by the "Cabinet Panner" bug.

Ed

[Jeff Wright]

On another subject relative to your drawing, I would suggest you reconsider having that full height cabinet on the right-most side. I feel you (or your spouse) will wish you had more counter space. The counter area shown to either side of your oven looks MIGHTY confining.

[Joe Dusel (Vista, CA)]

Your drawer width depends first off on how much space you have and then on what you want to store. In our kitchen we have 22" drawer boxes on each side of the cooktop. And it's a 36" cooktop, so we have some 34" wide drawer boxes under that to hold lots of pots and pans. We get a few more inches of drawer width due to the frameless construction.

I also agree that the full height cabinet would be a nuisance when it comes to the countertop space. I really don't think 18" of counter space is enough.

Joe

[Roger Jensen]

Thanks for your feedback.

This isn't the only counter space in the kitchen, it's just the wall I'm working on now.

We currently have a double oven where the double doors in picture are now, with a cook top in the middle. Believe it or not, this is actually an increase in counter space!

We want to get rid of the double oven and make it into a pantry. Relative to each other, we're long on counter space and short on storage. My wife is using the garage for much of her storage and wants to get it back in the house.

I had thought having more counter space and having just uppers instead of a full length pantry on the right so we could put appliances there. However, without a water source major appliances like the mixer and food processer would be a hassle to use (lots of drips carrying measuring cups and bowls back and forth to the sink).

Thanks for the feedback. I'll bounce some ideas off of my wife and see what we come up with.

BTW - I built a prototype lower cabinet that was 18 inches in width, so the drawers ended up being about 14 inches in width. When I used Blum Tandem full extension slides there ended up being quite a bit of useful space in the drawers so I think the 18 inch width is enough.

Thanks again,

Roger

[james mcgrew]

if you build framless as your plans show, one would have 14.5 inches of interior drawer width and 14.825 using blum undermounts with sides of .5 thick

jim

[Drew Lavis]

One thing worth doing is to consider what kinds of accessories you may want to put in them. Browse your local home improvement store for drawer inserts and the like, and see what the standard widths are.

A few years back I made the mistake of designing my kitchen cabinetry without taking this into consideration. One of my cabinets was meant to hold a slide-out waste bin. But it turned out to be slightly too narrow for too hold any of the store-bought accessories made for that purpose. I ended up having to put the waste bin in a space originally meant for a food pantry.