Maximizing Your Kitchen Storage Space

Don’t waste the opportunity to maximize the storage space in the kitchen when you’re remodeling. Kitchen designers have come up with ingenious ways to get more bang for your buck while expanding  the square footage of the room. With these nifty ideas in hand, use your next meeting with your kitchen designer to ensure you get as much storage space as possible.

• Consider clever moving shelves. Corner cabinets are usually wasted space. But not anymore! Engineering marvels now allow cabinet doors to pull out, featuring a row of useful shelves. At the same time, a second pull-out shelf appears behind it, a unit that’s normally lodged deep within the corner.
• Use the height. Don’t waste the space that sits above the upper row of cabinets. Sure, this space may be too high to accommodate dishes and pantry items used on a daily basis. But you can get a lot of mileage out of cabinets that extend to the ceiling by filling them with less-used items. These extended cabinets will hide items that would otherwise litter the surfaces of the kitchen, making it look clean and fresh.
• Put it under the sink. The space under kitchen sinks is often no-man’s land, a messy array of cleaners, sponges and questionable items. Get more from this convenient space by installing narrow shelves on cabinet doors, stacking shelves inside the cabinets and plastic buckets designed to hold cleaning tools.
• Install shelves. Feature special dishes and glassware on open shelving as way to increase the style of the room, while also serving functional. You can also install shelving in small spaces that would otherwise lie dormant, and increase the square footage in the room for storage.
• Use in-drawer ideas. Don’t waste space inside of drawers. Install wooden pegs extending from the bottom of the drawer, which allows you to stack dishes or serving bowls without fear of them toppling over every time you open or close the drawer.
• Organize it. Pull-out drawers are a great way to keep handy tools at-the-ready. But they can also become a tangled mess and make finding utensils a nightmare. Purchase silverware and spice organizers for each drawer to maintain order and get better use of your limited drawer space. It’s also possible to purchase customized organizers or install plastic ones that you can cut to size.
• Tie in another drawer. Clever kitchen cabinet manufacturers are making great use of wasted space in drawers. Now, one drawer can sit on top of another, sliding in and out, essentially doubling the amount of space you get out of each drawer.
• Store knives wisely. Don’t let a knife block take up valuable counter real estate. Instead, install a knife storage rack on the underside of an upper cabinet. The unit pulls down, so that knives become easily accessible but out of the way of young kids.
• Unique solutions for narrow spaces. Got a small space between two cabinets? Use it to store narrow items like cutting boards or cookie sheets, or turn it into a space for recycling.
• Opt for a pull-out pantry. Most people know how valuable a pantry can be to even standard cooks. However, pantries often become a wasteland for forgotten food – mostly because you can’t see what lies behind the first row of canned or boxed goods. A pull-out pantry, however, makes it easy to see every item you’ve tossed into the space, maximizing every square inch of the pantry.

No longer must you mourn over wasted or wanted space. With these space-saving ideas, you can turn your kitchen into a wonderland of well-used square footage.