Jonatan Weissnat Jr.
Family Handyman Add rollouts to your kitchen cabinets to maximize storage space, provide easier access, streamline your cooking, save your back and simplify clean-up chores. We show you key planning tips and where to find detailed rollout assembly instructions.
It may sound like hype, but adding rollouts to your kitchen storage cabinets can be life-changing.
I recently added pull out pantry shelves to our entire kitchen, and this is what happened:
My sore back and my husband’s bum knee are less of an issue pull out shelves since we no longer have to constantly stoop to find things in our base cabinets. Dinner prep goes a lot faster now that we’re not hunting for pot lids and baking pans piled on top of one another on our jumbled, dark shelves.
We can pull our shelves into the light and see everything, including the rancid oil and three boxes of cornstarch we somehow acquired—need some? The rollouts maximize every cubic inch of storage space, so I can store rarely used appliances in my cabinets instead of on my counters. This slide out cabinet shelves article will give you tips for planning, buying and building kitchen rollouts so they can change your life too. Building a slew of identical drawer boxes is easier, but having a variety gives you more versatility.
There are a dozen kinds of drawer slides out there, but if you want to keep shopping and installation simple, stick to these two types: For heavy-duty rollouts holding items such as canned goods, use slides rated for at least 100 lbs.
The big disadvantage: Most roller slides extend only three-quarters of their length—the back of the drawer stays in the cabinet. The big advantage of these slides is that they extend fully, giving you complete access to everything in the drawer.
Home centers carry ball-bearing slides, but you’ll find a wider variety at woodworkershardware.com. It’s easy to shim behind a slide with layers of masking tape to make up for a too-small drawer.
Kitchen designer Mary Jane Pappas typically recommends 18- to 30-in.-wide rollout drawers for cabinets: “Any larger and they’re too clumsy. The most useful rollout shelves and drawers are the ones closest to the floor since these eliminate the most awkward bending and crouching.
If want to limit your time and money investment, you’ll get the most bang for your buck by retrofitting these areas first. Second-rate slides and rollers can sag or seize up under sacks of flour and pots and pans.
Epoxy-coated wire rollouts and plastic inserts work fine for light-duty items, but they have a tendency to crack, bend and scratch if packed with heavy loads like canned goods.
Last winter I replaced every single cabinet shelf in our kitchen with rollouts, custom-designed for whatever needed storing.
These vertical rollouts in my shop are dedicated to jugs, cans and jars of finishes and solvents. But that’s a recipe for mistakes because it’s easy to forget to subtract one of the components (like the width of the slides or the drawers) from the overall measurement.
It’s a great visual aid that helps you prevent mistakes and having to walk between your kitchen and your shop constantly to double-check measurements. This means some extra building work and buying more slides, but the smaller rollouts will operate more smoothly and easily.
My daughter called her pantry “the black hole” because she could never find what she needed on the deep shelves.
I replaced the five full-width shelves with two six-drawer stacks of sturdy full-extension drawers from IKEA, supported by interior center panels. Finishing touches include soft-close dampers on the drawers and iron-on edge-banding for the birch plywood panels. It may not be labeled “Baltic birch” at home centers, but you’ll be able to identify it by comparing it with other hardwood plywood in the racks.
The biggest disadvantages of using Baltic birch are that it costs more than standard hardwood plywood and can be harder to find. All the drawer boxes in my shop are super simple: butt-joint corners and glued-on bottoms. Rollout Ideas and Plans: Simple Pantry Rollouts A great way to get more storage space in even the smallest kitchen is by putting those narrow spaces and filler areas to work with pull out pantry shelves. The other is a more traditional, three-drawer pantry rollout that reuses your existing cabinet door and hardware.
This article gives step-by-step instructions for how to build two types of customizable rollout trays that fit around and below plumbing pipes, garbage disposers and other obstacles beneath your sink. These rollouts transform that “I’m not sure what’s under there” storage space into an organized and efficient location for cleaning supplies that lets you see everything you’ve got in one glance.
