important when two or more cooks will be sharing the same kitchen.
Avoid piles. If your serving dishes are under your dinner plates, which are in turn under your dessert plates, you’re going to have a problem. Ditto for your cutting board collection. Either you must perform the precarious feat of pulling out the plate you want from under the others, or you have to lift half the stack and lay it aside while you grab the one you want. Instead, add shelves or use racks so that each grouping of dishes or boards is separate and easy to access. Vertical racks can work, too, but they will generally take up a bit more space because you need dividers to keep the items upright.
Heavy items, if not stored on the countertop, are best stored between waist and eye level. Avoid storing heavy pots or fragile items where you have to stretch to reach them. Drop a cast-iron cooking pot, and your kitchen floor could be damaged. Or, worse, you could drop something on yourself.
Utensils that fit drawer organizers like pieces in a puzzle leave no excuses for putting the pizza cutter in the wrong drawer.
Horizontal cabinet doors that open upward allow you to access or reload contents without the doors getting in your way—and with little danger you’ll ever bump your head on them!
Vertical storage beats piles, especially overhead. You only have to be able to reach the bottom corner of a cookie sheet to pull it down.
SMARTtip
Storage Strategies
Tiers allow you to see what’s in store behind the first row. You can buy tiered shelf inserts at many home-goods stores, or you can build them for little or no cost. (See page 59.)
Elongated, clear containers like these make good use of cabinet space and allow you to see what you have. Always choose food containers that have airtight lids.
Helper shelves make it easy to reach the dinner plates without having to remove the dessert plates first. Many models are available, or you can build your own. (See page 57.)
When loading a cabinet, put the tallest items toward the back, as shown in this section view. That way, you can see smaller items up front, but the taller items remain visible.
Visibility Counts
Try not to store items where you can’t see them, such as behind rows of canned, boxed, or bagged goods. Putting larger items toward the back of a shelf and smaller items up front will help. Tiered inserts are sometimes a good solution, too. They allow you to view all of the contents on a shelf or in a cabinet. Because the tiers raise each successive row of goods from front to back, there’s no need to pull out every soup can to grab the one you want. (See the illustration on page 25.) Another solution is to store dry goods, such as flour, beans, and rice, in long, deep, clear containers. (See the illustration on page 25.) The contents will be visible, and you can minimize or eliminate having to put some items where they can’t be seen. If clear containers are not available, use labels so you know the contents without having to pull it off the shelf. Remember, visibility is a great memory prompter. If you can’t see it, you may forget you have it.
Good lighting also makes it easier to see what you need. To do so with a cabinet, illumination must be able to reach inside the cabinet. Ideally, it should come from several angles so that items are not in shadow. Nor should your body cast a shadow in the area where you’re searching. (See the illustrations on this page for optimal placement of lights along a run of cabinets.) For countertops, consider under-cabinet lighting. Then, whether you’re using the under-cabinet space for chopping vegetables or reading a recipe, you’ll have good visibility. Lighting base cabinets with shelves is more difficult. One solution is to build in lighting. Connect it to a door switch so it automatically comes on when you open the cabinet door. Another is to install pullout shelves or to install base cabinets with deep drawers. With either approach, your ceiling lighting should be adequate.
Lighting counters and cabinets takes some thought. This illustration shows one way to do it. Lights inside cabinets are another solution.
SMARTtip
Lighten Up
It’s fine to go with dark cabinet exteriors if that’s your preferred look, but you may want to use light colors for cabinet interiors and for shelves. As light from ceiling fixtures strikes the light-colored surfaces, it will reflect onto the items you store there, making them easier to see—and find. Alternately, use pullouts, which enable you to move stored items into the light.
This well-lit kitchen includes downlights in the ceiling, uplighting over cabinets, fixtures over cabinet openings, lighting inside and under cabinets, and even a light strip along the floor beneath the pantry cabinets.
Here’s the same kitchen with many of the lights turned off.
These fixtures, which are mounted to the cabinet tops, throw light inside when the doors are open, without interfering with the door swing.
These fixtures cast plenty of light along the countertop—an area that would otherwise be partially shaded by the cabinets or the cook.
In-cabinet lighting is meant to display contents stored behind glass doors. Glass shelves enhance the visual effect.
Under-cabinet lighting is also available with energy-saving fluorescent fixtures. LED lights have also become very popular for this purpose.
To See or Not to See
Deciding whether you want be able to see your stored items or not is often a compromise between aesthetics and functionality. Some people like to showcase items, but that’s not important to everyone. Others