When considering a kitchen remodeling project, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the details and choices available. Add in a desire to make your space more accessible with some outstanding Universal Design elements, and it can become downright mind-boggling. Boggle no more and read on for seven great elements you can incorporate into your kitchen cabinets.
Durable Low Maintenance Construction
Let’s face it—cleaning the kitchen is not something we’re all dying to do. We don’t know about you, but our desire to clean does not increase as we age.
Aesthetics are typically the first thing we consider when choosing a cabinet door style for our new kitchen. This is certainly not bad, and we’d suggest you consider how easy or difficult the profiles will be to clean. Have you ever tried to get pasta sauce out of a groove in your cabinet door? It’s not fun. Consider cabinet door styles with a less ornate profile, like Shaker flat panel doors. Fewer grooves mean easier cleaning.
There’s no doubt that painted cabinetry is all the rage, and with all the beautiful farmhouse chic kitchens we’re seeing, it’s easy to get a little kitchen envy. Just keep in mind that painted cabinetry tends to show nicks and dents more readily and can be costlier to repair if they are damaged. Stained cabinetry, however, will hide those daily bumps and bruises more easily. Stained cabinetry will also show less dust and dirt, so you can clean less often.
Multiple Height Work Surfaces
Spending an evening preparing a meal or preparing for a party can be a great time. Although the backache you get from standing at the counter might make you wish you could sit down while chopping veggies and mincing garlic. Incorporating multiple cabinet heights in your new kitchen design will give you options to vary the working height depending on your task. Rolling dough could be easier on a lower-height counter, but chopping celery may be easier standing at a work surface of normal height. Having a work surface higher than usual will make it easier to talk your taller friends and family into helping or make life easier if you’re the tall one in the family. So, whether you are recovering from knee surgery, or you are built at the same height as the “normal” person, having varied height counters in your kitchen will make life much more enjoyable.
Drawers vs Doors
We know you love getting down on your knees to find that thing you know you tucked in the back of one of your lower cabinets. Including more drawers in base cabinets is a great way to make the items you store in those cabinets more easy to organize, store, and access. By varying the depth of the drawers, you can provide places to store smaller things like cooking utensils and larger items like pots and pans. No more going spelunking to get to your soup pot.
Full Extension Drawers
Another detail to complement your use of drawers is the use of full-extension drawer hardware. Remember your mom’s kitchen, where you had to pull half the stuff out of a drawer to get to the things in the back? Full-extension hardware allows you to pull the drawer out far enough to view the entire contents. Now, you can utilize every inch of the storage space without having to dig through the contents to find what you’re looking for.
Pull Out Shelving
Pull-out shelves, also called roll-out trays, provide another storage option that eliminates the need to crawl into your cabinets. They’re great for taller items that are tough to store in a typical drawer. Coupled with full-extension drawer hardware, bulkier items like Tupperware containers become a lot easier to organize.
Contrasting Colors
Raise your hand if you have ever felt like falling off Mount Everest when you step down a one-inch step you didn’t know was there. Don’t be shy. We have all done it. A more dangerous version of this is when you lean on a counter and miss the edge because you misjudged its location. As we age and our eyesight starts to fade, it gets harder to see where one edge starts and the other ends. Using contrasting cabinet and countertop colors provides better visual cues for where one surface starts and the other ends. This could save you or your family from an embarrassing moment or an injury.
Hardware Details
Like cabinet door styles, cabinet hardware is most often chosen solely based on its aesthetic contribution. This makes perfect sense since it is often seen as the jewelry your cabinets wear.
When choosing hardware, please take a moment to consider the clearance it provides for grasping it. Pay attention to whether or not you have to use two fingers or if you can grip it with your whole hand. Pulling open a drawer that’s loaded with pots and pans with just two fingers might be challenging, and a lack of clearance with the cabinet door or drawer almost ensures that you’ll scratch it up with your fingernails with normal use. Mixing handles and pulls is a popular way to mix up the design elements and give you more grip on the needed cabinets.
