Drawer Front Sizing/Layout

[Zachary Caldwell]

I am almost done with my kitchen build. I figured out how I wanted my fronts sized after a little trial and error. I was wondering if there was a method to sizing if you wanted a 3 drawer or 4 drawer bank? Basically is there a "standard"? I was thinking if I ever do this again, which hopefully I will get to build another kitchen one day because it's been kind of fun, I was hoping for a faster layout of the drawers. Thanks

[Lee Schierer]

I don't think there are any standards other than normally the thinner drawers are at the top and the deeper drawers are at the bottom. Since it is a kitchen determine what is likely to be placed in the drawers and determine the rough size from that information. In our kitchen we have several cabinets with drawers. One has three drawers to the left of the stove. The upper drawer holds large utensils and is about 4" deep. The other two drawers are 7" deep and hold pots and pans and backing pans. The other cabinet has four drawers. The upper three are all 4" deep with the bottom one at 7" deep. The upper one holds silverware, the middle two hold towels and some cookbooks, the bottom one is all cookbooks.

[Alan Gage]

I'm finishing up my kitchen now and this is how I handled that part of the design phase (every cabinet is drawers with no cabinet doors).

My cabinets use 1" horizontal face frames with 1/16" gaps.

So a 4 drawer cabinet will have five horizontal frames at 1" each (5" total) and it will have eight 1/16" gaps (1/2" total) for a total of 5 1/2" that will be taken up by something other than a drawer front.

My total cabinet height, minus the toe kick, was 33 1/2". When I subtract 5 1/2" (total of rails and gaps) from 33 1/2" (total height) I'm left with 28" of space to be filled with drawer fronts.

At this point it's a simple matter of dividing that 28" into 4 separate front sizes to fit the size of drawers you want. (5.5 + 6.5 + 6.5 + 9.5=28).

I started by making a list of the most logical combinations for both 3 and 4 drawer fronts and wrote them in a list. This made it easier to quickly rough in the sizes I wanted for each cabinet in the planning phase. If one of those initial combinations didn't work like I wanted I'd just tweak the sizes to get what I wanted.

Alan