Kitchen principles: Don't dig for things

There's a special brand of frustration reserved for digging in the back of cabinets and refrigerators for that one ingredient jar that you haven't used in months. Engineering my way out of this frustration has been an ongoing goal of mine for the past couple years. I think having ingredients and equipment be within easy reach genuinely makes baking/cooking more enjoyable.

Below are a couple ideas for custom-built organizers that I've designed and built with my dad, optimized for this apartment's kitchen.

Pull out drawer

This apartment has a set of cabinets that are stupid deep (~23 in/58 cm). I say stupid because if I need anything in the back, then I feel stupid standing there for a minute taking everything out just to put it right back.

Fed up with constantly digging for things in the back of this cabinet, I worked with my dad to design a pull out drawer that we could add to the cabinet. The resulting drawer has vertical dividers so I can organize ingredients. Most importantly, it pulls out far enough so that I can always reach the back.



I specifically didn't want a handle in the front, so my dad made this face place for easier gripping.

To install the drawer, we added a shelf to which the drawer slides could be mounted. My dad fashioned these pins that could be inserted into the pre-drilled holes in the cabinets. The shelf had grooves to slide onto the pins and could then be secured into place without any screws. This let us install the drawer without needing to drill any new holes into the existing cabinets.



This was kind of a pain to install because the cabinet was so deep.

Sliding shelves

In a different cabinet, I store a decent collection of flours. The cabinet is deep enough to fit three 1.1 quart OXO containers in a column. Unfortunately, this meant that any time I needed a flour container in the back, I had to do the same song and dance again.



This was the only before photo I had, which also shows how much I like labels

After the success of the cabinet drawer, I started mulling over a way to get the OXO containers to slide out so I could reach the back container without needing to remove the front ones. I decided to mount small planks of wood onto drawer slides so that a column of containers could extend outward, allowing me to reach the back. If I used push-to-open drawer slides, there wouldn't be a risk of the sliders accidentally sliding open, since they'll be secured when "closed".

I ordered four drawer slides from Rockler, my dad helped me cut some wood, and we built out the following contraption in my apartment:



Each shelf was designed to hold 3 OXO containers, for a total of 12 containers.

Some tweaks we had to make to the vague design in my head while building:

• Since the drawer slides extended fully outward bearing a non-significant amount of weight, we did have to secure the back of this shelf to the cabinetry to prevent tipping.
• I added non-slip drawer liners to the bottom of each pull-out shelf so the containers wouldn't slide around as the shelf slid out. We decided not to glue the liners down since realistically I'm only using one container at a time.

The result was pretty satisfying. Sometimes I just click the shelves open for no reason at all.

Custom shelf inserts

The apartment comes with built-in wooden shelves that are 4 inches (~10 cm) deep. Which if you think about it, is a fairly useless depth since it's such a vertically inefficient use of space.



My attempt to use these shelves in 2023

I worked with my dad to design a few shelf inserts that could slide onto each shelf and take up the full vertical height instead. We designed two inserts: a spice rack and a utility shelf.

To maximize the number of bottles the spice rack can hold, we designed the rack so that each spice bottle will lay on its side. The top of each bottle has a label, so I can scan the alphabetized grid to find what I want.



My dad's Excel mockup of the spice rack for me to approve.

The utility shelf, for lack of a better name, is primarily optimized to hold as many random things I was previously storing on the shelves as possible. The key feature was the column of stacked angled holders for longer items like pens and scissors. This let me combine what was held in multiple pen holders into a single column:



Initial concept sketch that I sent to my dad.

I eventually want to have all 5 shelves contain a custom insert (we're currently working on a third design to hold rolls of aluminum foil/parchment paper/etc.). For now, this is what we have built:



Turns out the spice rack cubby holes can hold anything cylindrical.

tl;dr – one of my kitchen principles is don't dig for things. And I'm probably never moving out of this apartment as a result.