You should put drawers in almost every lower cabinet.
Everything Comes to You
Think about a traditional lower cabinet.
You open the doors, crouch down, move three pots out of the way, and reach into the back trying to find the one thing you actually need.
With a drawer, you pull it out and everything comes to you.
Pots. Pans. Mixing bowls. Food storage containers. Small appliances.
You can stand there and see almost everything at once.
I’ll take that every time.
No More Tupperware Graveyard
You know that mysterious area in the back of a lower cabinet where plastic containers go to disappear for three years?
Drawers pretty much eliminate it.
Because you can pull the entire drawer out, it’s a lot harder for things to get buried in the back.
And this isn’t just about Tupperware.
I like deep drawers for pots and pans, medium drawers for dishes and bowls, and shallower drawers for cooking utensils and all the smaller stuff that normally gets tossed into a cabinet.
Where I’d Still Use Doors
I’m not saying you need to eliminate every lower cabinet door.
There are a couple of places where doors still make sense.
Under the kitchen sink is the obvious one. You’ve got plumbing, the garbage disposal, shutoffs, and potentially other equipment under there. I want easy access to all of it.
I’d also use doors where the cabinet layout or a blind corner makes drawers impractical.
But everywhere else… Drawers all day!
Decide This Before You Order Cabinets
This is exactly the kind of decision that’s really easy to overlook when you’re designing a kitchen.
Something as simple as doors versus drawers can have a bigger impact on how you actually use the kitchen every day.
So when you sit down with your cabinet designer, don’t just accept whatever lower cabinet configuration shows up on the first drawing.
Ask where you can use drawers instead.
This is exactly why I created the Ultimate Home Building Checklist. It’s filled with hundreds of little decisions like this that are easy to miss when you’re building a house but can make a big difference once you actually live there.
