kitchen face frame height - how small is too small

[Bob Cooper]

Designing some kitchen cabinets and i've sketched out some face frame opennings as small as 2.5" tall. I won't be using Blum blu-motion slides so i won't lose too much on the bottom but it got me to wondering...how shallow is too shallow? i'm thinking i may a minimum of 2.5" of usable space which would make my ff openning more like 3.5".

[Chris Rosenberger]

I have built cabinets with 2 1/2" tall drawer openings. The usable drawer depth is about 1 5/8".
The drawers work very well for knives & utensils.

[johnny means]

Modern kitchen design is rapidly moving away from cabinets down low and shallow drawers. Is there any reason, besides tradition, that you want to make pencil drawers for a kitchen.

[Bob Cooper]

johnny...well i guess so that it gives me more drawers with less wasted space. What's the alternative -- i.e. what is the trend then -- bigger deeper drawers? I've got some that are fairly deep in my current house and they seem to get kind of cluttered.

Also 'moving away from cabinets down low' <-- what's changing?

Not being critical...just curious.

[johnny means]

Well, a lot of people are seeing how difficult is is to get at pots and pans stacked two feet deep in a cabinet that requires you to requires you to stoop to knee level to see or reach into. Lower cabinets aren't much different than cramming all you stuff in a U-haul box tipped on its side. As for the drawer depth, sure our silverware fits into a pencil drawer just right. But then we're left with five or six more pencil drawers that won't fit a ladle, measuring cup, steaming basket, Tupperware, along with any of the other 5000 kitchen items that require a little more than1.5" of depth. The traditional kitchen cabinet basically gives you one drawer that doesn't fit much of anything in exchange for a lower cupboard that isn't practical for anything. When I can finally get around to actually redoing my own kitchen, it will be completely made up of drawers designed to basically hold everything that you can't eat. Plates, bowls, cups, pots, pans, storageware, etc. All this will be easily accessible and sorted in pretty stainless steel racks. While the upper cabinets, which I can easily see into and peruse will hold strictly food items, so I can browse through them and easily see what I have or don't. No more forgotten bags of potatoes mutating in the dark or buying canned milk when I've got an entire zombie apocalypse worth.

[Jeff Duncan]

Well if space is at a premium your first step should be to do away with the face frames;)

Face frames are more a visual design aspect than practical. Go with frameless cabinets and you maintain more usable cabinet space. As far as how shallow is too shallow.....if you can't use it, it's too shallow! If it fits your needs...then it's not:rolleyes: What kind of slides are you using? You don't really need an extra inch of room for the drawer unless the slides dictate it. For instance if I'm doing something more like a piece of furniture where the drawer would rest on the web frame, (which I would never do in a kitchen BTW), I sometimes use 1/8" clearance in height and width. If your using side mounts you could get away with maybe 1/4" clearance in height. Really depends on what your using and how you design it to work.

Lastly Johnny is right about the trend towards drawers. I've been steering my clients that way for about a decade now, and haven't had one that regretted doing either drawers or pullouts instead of just a box with shelves. I also get a fair amount of calls from people who want me to put pullouts in their existing cabinets. There's still a need for some base cabinets, just fewer than what used to be the norm.

good luck,
JeffD

[scott vroom]

Bob, there's nothing inherently wrong with shallow drawers; no design rules I'm aware of discourage them. Having said that, when I'm building a base run I strive to make all of the top drawers the same depth because I believe it is more visually appealing. For drawers located beneath the top drawers, I design to be the depth required for each drawer regardless of adjacent drawer depths.

I agree with others about the trend away from open shelving in base cabinets. I typically build base cabinets with drawers and pull out shelving behind doors.

[Mike Goetzke]

I'm a serious woodworking hobbyist that built kitchen cabinets for our house. Under our wall over and below the under-counter mounted microwave I had small openings maybe around 4" and I made wide pullout drawers (good for cutting boards/cookie sheets...) but applied slab fronts with decorative edge rather than raised panel. Also, my wife wanted drawers in many spaces instead of doors so I went with increasing sized drawers the lower they were. Even though the top drawer front was maybe 5"-6" tall they did't look right as FF. So the top drawers were slab front and the bottom ones FF.

Mike

[Zach Callum]

Instead of small drawer openings, you could build a drawer within a drawer. Meaning that, if you have a drawer, say 6" in height, you would build a drawer 3" in height, that fits inside of the 6" drawer. You mount drawer guides on the smaller drawer that extend towards the inside of the cabinet, so that when you open the Larger drawer, you can push the smaller drawer back inside the cabinet. You end up with more useable space this way. Does that make sense?

[Mark Kay]

Instead of small drawer openings, you could build a drawer within a drawer. Meaning that, if you have a drawer, say 6" in height, you would build a drawer 3" in height, that fits inside of the 6" drawer. You mount drawer guides on the smaller drawer that extend towards the inside of the cabinet, so that when you open the Larger drawer, you can push the smaller drawer back inside the cabinet. You end up with more useable space this way. Does that make sense?

I agree this is a great idea... I first saw it on I think Marc Bartholomew's kitchen show on the DIY Network. You also need to cut down the rear of the larger "original" drawer so the top "insert" drawer can move backward. You can use the top drawer for, say, knives or silverware, pull the main drawer open and then slide the inner top drawer backwards to expose what's underneath. EXCELLENT idea! I'm going to implement it into my new [upcoming] kitchen cabs build!