My DH and I went to see them today. I could take or leave them but DH thinks it's a very efficient use of space and at $33 extra/cabinet, we'll be adding them. I can see value for things like platters and plates we use for summer parties and christmas (different set of course). Thanks for all the feedback. One more decision made!

I love Loves' cabs and toekick drawers so much that I am having my kitchen done by the same cab company. They will be ready the first week in March. Getting toe kick drawers too.

I have always loved loves :) But here are mine anyhoo..

The ugly mat is gone (DH kept taking it out of the trash so I fed it to a moose):

By the way, the space is sealed. You're not just sliding the drawer into an open abyss (at least not in mine). No mice (not to mention, if you have that big of an issue with mice they're in your lower and upper cabinets as well likely).

She likes them:

Thankyou, Igloochic. The photos are very helpful. And I love the moose! I'm in NH and we've seen them out in the swampy area behind the house but never that close and personal. Very cool.

Igloochic and Loves2cookfor6, those are really great photos. What a wonderful way to use space efficiently! I love that you fed the mat to a moose, Igloochic. My husband once kept taking this one particular thing back out of the garbage after I repeatedly threw it away, but finally I took it out on garbage day after he left for work. I wish I had a handy moose around, or a goat! :o)

I wish we had moose so I could feed them things that I don't want (g). My husband takes things out of the trash too - what is that - a guy thing??

Great ideas for more storage! Thank you so much. I've thought about including toe-kick drawers but wondered what I would store in them. I especially like the idea of including them with the drawer above so I don't have to stoop quite so far to get something out. And with 2 large dogs and a cat, there's always pet hair on the floor no matter how often I sweep. Including the space in the drawer above hopefully will mean pet hair won't get into the drawer, which has always concerned me with toe-kick drawers.

The ugly mat is gone (DH kept taking it out of the trash so I fed it to a moose)

Igloochick - that might be one of the funniest things I have read here. My DH is the same way. I just wait until he's gone for the weekend.

As for toe kick drawers - I am all about the Ikea hack to make them; I can think of lots of stuff to keep in a shallow drawer like that!

Hmm, igloo, maybe you could start a new line of children's books: If You Give a Moose a Mat. :)

I thought you were kidding about the moose! Those husbands are such pack rats...they save everything! But since its valentines day, I'll cut him a break and wait until tomorrow to re-throw some things away...

I wanted toe kick drawers in my island, but I let the cabinetmaker talk me out of them. He was so against them-things would get dusty, hard to reach them, yada yada yada. Now I wish I'd have stood my ground. I think they'd be the perfect place to store the extra oven racks when I'm making something big, like a turkey. He also insisted that there wasn't room for a shallow drawer under my cooktop--but in actuality, there was. It's not that big of a deal, I have a lot of storage space anyway, but it bugs me that I let myself be talked out of 'em.

So, moose are kind of like goats? In that they'll eat pretty much anything? Wow, you learn something new every day.

:-)

Cj

I love the moose.

Love the moose!

One word of caution...
I'm glad I didn't go for them. It would have been a disaster.
Turns out in my old house (1916) the floor sloped a good 1.5" from one end of the cab run to the other. GC ended up cutting off some of the cabinet bottoms so that we could have level counters. The 1.5" diff isn't noticable in the toe kick at all, but drawers would have been funky with one side shorter than the other :)

igloochick,
You mentioned yours are sealed.
How?
Do they have a bottom under them, as though they were another inside drawer?

I'm building my own and have a serious mouse problem -- 4 cats who think they're animated toys and a dog who shares her bowl with them. My house isn't sealed, so if I can at least seal a cabinet, all the better.

Thanks!
Christine

I know its a year later but I was hoping to get some info from peeps that have toe kick drawers or deeper drawers that utilize that "kick" space. I would very much like to have some but the cabinet company that I was looking at does not have them. I see that loves2cook4six's are from Ayr Cabinetry. Anybody else? ---as for the coment : By the way, the space is sealed. You're not just sliding the drawer into an open abyss (at least not in mine). No mice (not to mention, if you have that big of an issue with mice they're in your lower and upper cabinets as well likely).--- And your pantry and your countertops and maybe under the butter lid, cleaning up the toaster crumbs :)

Also igloochic Being the moose and duck hunter/eater that I am I love those drawer pulls! The moose especially. They appear to be good quality, no?

Igloo - love the moose - hope it didn't come in for breakfast.
Gemini16 (from A2gemini) - I wish I heard of them and put one under my oven stack to store my trays for the advantium.

I didn't get my toekick drawers :( Dang budget constraints (cheaper cabinet line=fewer options).

Still with I had them...and a DH's-college-notebook-eating moose.

For those of you wishing you had done toe kick drawers, I have seen posts about retrofitting them in.

How to Build Under-Cabinet Drawers

Toe kick drawers for IKEA cabinets

Love mine!

where can you buy these drawers?
We are about to purchase base cabinets RTA Conestoga cabinets, and I thought as long as we are putting them together, we could add a couple toe kick drawers.

I'm going with flush toe on all my lowers except the kitchen sink.
All I do is clean dust and dog hair from under there. The flush bottoms will be easier to keep clean.

What a wonderful idea to add more storage! My only concern would be in cleaning the floor with the drawers so low. I would love to have toe kick drawers for my table placemats and for other storage items!

In a tiny kitchen, every bit of space makes a HUGE difference. It really depends on how storage-stressed you are.

I am having toe kick drawers put in. My cabinet maker had not done them before, but agreed to do them for me.

He was trying to use a touch latch, but is finding that it won't pop the drawer out far enough for me to grab the drawer from the top - I'd have to grab it from the side (which might be a challenge in some areas).

So we are considering two other options:
1) installing a small knob or handle towards the top so that it won't be too noticable
2) cutting a groove into the top of the drawer/face plate that you can insert your finger and pull the drawer out. My concern with this is that it would allow more dust into the drawer.

Thoughts?

"Also, how can you avoid the deep bend to reach down and pull a handle 2'' from the floor? Does anyone have toe kick drawers that you literally ''kick'' open and shut?"

Even if you don't have to bend down to "open" the drawer you will have to bend to get the contents out, so not sure this really matters.

Hi all, Which comes first - the new hardwood flooring or the new cabinets with toe kicks?

If you add flooring later it'll block your toe kick drawers. You want your flooring under your toe kicks, not abutted to them.

Yes that is what I thought - Thank you. The flooring companies do not want to install flooring first - saying it is bad to have cabinets on hardwood floors...Hmmm.

The only way to have the cabinets be the correct height is to either install them on top of the finished floor, or to install them on shims to the finished floor height. Every measurement starts with the finished floor height, not the subfloor.

love my toekick drawers! I put narrow handles on them about 1/2 from the top so that I can pull them out with my foot (I hook my toes into them) after doing the "kick" thing to pop them partially out. In my U- shaped kitchen there is almost no vantage point where the handles can be seen from my average female height. Of course you do have to bend down if what you want is in that drawer.

Re: "The ugly mat is gone (DH kept taking it out of the trash so I fed it to a moose)"

Igloochick - As the old Scotsman once said..."if that's a moose, I'd hate to see a rat!" ;-)

love the toe kick drawers, especially those extending into the "regular" drawer fronts, for small kitchens and cooks with big collections!

I want to use the "toe kick" idea to open my garbage cabinet. My hands are always mucky with something that I want to throw away and I hate grabbing a drawer handle to pull out the trash bins. Shouldn't there be a way to do this simple task "hands free"?

I bought the IKEA utrusta electrical push open for the trash drawer.

Ours look like Igloochic's and we use them to and we keep the dog dishes in there and just have them eat from the drawers too.

I have them...and if you are Platter Lover like me - they are totally worth it! I can grab them easily and the chance of chipping is reduced.

Mimi- do they actually open with a nudge, of your foot or toe, or do you still have to pull them out?

Mine open (full extension) with a nudge of my toe. I think they are the Blum Tip-Ons.

What is the net depth of the toe kick drawer with a standard toe kick height? My cabinet maker said 1.5-2 inches. Is that going to be useful space?

Toe kick drawers are perfect for tight kitchens and collectors of multiple pots and pans-cast iron, stainless and copper. there is valuable space being wasted. I would also make the kick more than 4" tall, to 5-1/2", and bring it forward to 1-1/2" from door face.

We are remodeling our kitchen with solid cherry floors on the diagonal done already under all the cabinets. When I ordered my Kraftmaid cabinets, I insisted on toe kick drawers on every base cabinet that could have them (which excluded a blind base, sink base, and 12" cabinet) because we aren't using upper cabinets (we want to make the kitchen look less cluttered and more reachable). The problem with the toe kick drawers I ran into yesterday had to do with the EZ-Level cabinet levelers I ordered which will not work with toe kick drawers because of the way they are made. My husband is putting in the cabinets and insisted on the EZ-Level system along with a cross plane laser level because shims are such a pain to try to get right and we need things perfectly level so our granite doesn't crack. The solution we came up with, which we later found out is used for handicapped kitchens so wheel chair front rollers can go under toe kicks is to raise every cabinet up by 1.75", making the overall height for us 37-3/4". I happened to have a large quantity of 3/4" x 3"x5' cherry boards that are suitable to cut down and make the frame under the cabinets, then, instead of the floppy plywood trim Kraftmaid sent to cover the toekick drawers face, I am going to make matching cherry toe kick drawer faces from this wood as well. We also will be making a platform trimmed in cherry to raise our range up to the new level of the cabinets. I have been playing with these drawers ever since the cabinets came and, as they have full extensions, I am going to fit everything from a short folding stepladder to trays, platters, extra table linen, screw gun, hammer, lightbulbs, etc. in them. They are easy to push open with a nudge of the foot, and pop out enough to pull out the rest of the way with a toe. As for bending to the floor, I find that keeps me spry, just like laying the floor ourselves helped strengthen my knees and aid in kneeling. I am 68 next month and my husband will be 70 in August and we have done all the work ourselves, including putting up a Kleer Beadboard ceiling (which I won in an HGTV contest!)

You two are amazing. That is all way tooo complicated for me to have plowed through. Keep up the good work !

I’m having a toe kick step put into every base cabinet that has an upper. Those few inches are the difference between my being my being able to reach the highest shelf comfortably.

while I appreciate the idea of having more storage with toe kick drawers, my be8ng able to easily access top shelves in actuality will provide me woth more easily accessible storage.

My current stove has a drawer on the bottom and it’s really uncomfortable to get items out of such a low storage area.

$500 per cabinet upcharge for a stool is a heck of a lot more than a $20 foldable stepstool that fits in one of those $500 upgrades made as a drawer.

FWIW, it's not costing me $500 per toe kick step and my cost for toe kick risers amortized over the number of times I will NOT have to pull out the step stool or strain on tippy toe to reach something and hope it won't crash down on top of me makes it well worth it to me. :-)

One of the benefits of having a small kitchen is that the cost of materials for a small space is minimal compared to a normal or large kitchen so what I don't have to spend in more cabinets or back splash tile or counters, I can use to make my small space as functionally unique as I want. :-) Also means I can splurge on materials that might be prohibitively expensive if I had more counters :-)

We had toekick drawers at our last house and found them very useful - thanks Gardenweb! The baking one held cookie cutters, sprinkles, and other smaller or seasonal stuff. The one here held platters. I had another one for table linens, etc. It isn't too obvious in this pic, but my toekick drawers had a lip at the top. I would just open the drawer with my toe because, at 6', I didn't want to be down there looking for a handle. Even at my height, I didn't have any problem reaching the stuff in the drawer (because I was reaching from the top and the drawer is shallow enough that you aren't rifling through it looking for a plethora of items), but I didn't store anything in there that I'd use every day. Note that our tile was installed under the cabinetry (otherwise the drawer may run into the flooring). When we sold the house, these were the sorts of things that drew raves about functionality.

I changed my mind for toekick drawers. The extra cost of buying drawers for the 4 base cabinets I thought to do it, would have been close to $500 per drawer if you include the special hardware, drawer and front panel.

The longer I thought about it, I realized the older you get its harder to bend lower to even pull things out a bottom drawer in a base cabinet, so one down on the actual floor level would be harder. I decided to save the money and spend it on other storage organization inside my cabinets :)

This is a significant thread on Houzz for research about toekick drawers, and I'm surprised that it's only vaguely been mentioned here that toekick drawers can scrape the floor, damaging flooring of various types including tile. While I could use the extra storage in my tiny kitchen, a kitchen designer has tried to persuade me against them due to this problem she's seen. Obviously most posters here don't seem to have this issue except the one who raised up the entire cabinet run, not desirable for people who are already ordering custom cabinets with custom heights. I'm still debating if this will work in my home as I've had a lot of foundation shifting over the years with multiple foundation repairs, and even if the floor would currently sustain toekick drawers, I am concerned future foundation movement could interfere.

I am in the process of finalizing my cabinet order and just decided against toe kick drawers to save the money - ours would have been $475 each and I need to trim the total cost, so, that's that. Plus, everywhere I toe kick drawers would have been most functional for us is also a place we need to pull a vent or return into the toe kick space. Sad, because I really wanted them for all of the cool storage examples other posters noted above (plus we have a small kitchen and I'm looking to maximize space and love little nooks and crannies), but it isn't in the cards for us apparently.

I did the same as you Kellie. I had about 6 places it would have worked. I'm glad I decided against it even though I liked the idea so much and had it as an idea for probably 2-3 years. After rethinking it, besides the cost, I realized the older you get, the harder it is to bend down that low to get something out of a drawer that low.

Love my toe kick drawers for cookie sheets, cutting boards, Lightbulbs, Trashbags, Secret hiding spot for cash, Financial statements and things you would not want to be easily found by a house sitter or your children’s friends.

Negative:

If you cram too much into them they get hung up underneath the cabinet above and won’t open. It becomes an acrobatic act to open it.