What do you have now? Do you like it?

I have framed, and I think I would prefer frameless.

I have framed now. I wouldn't mind more cabinet space.

I just tore out circa 1969 framed cabinets (with 40 years worth of paint) and replaced them with frameless -- it feels like my kitchen has doubled in size without changing the footprint at all.

Frameless!

I replaced 1980's framed with ikea frameless and drawers. This quadrupled the truly useable storage volume and made it more accessible. Frameless base cabinets give you a lot more space. Drawers in frameless cabinets are a lot more roomy than drawers in framed.

On a wall, framed can work. A single large framed cabinet with long shelves inside it can give you more useable volume than a series of modular boxes. A cabinet box like this has to be custom made but that is not a big deal. Then, any doors.

Another frameless vote.

Another frameless vote! I have framed and wish I had frameless and if I was to buy new cabinets, they would be frameless.

It's mostly about storage. Some think framed are stronger. You can search for a thread on that. I got frameless, so obviously I was not concerned about the strength of the cabinets. Frameless have been the standard in Europe for many years (since WWII?).

My experience was like ZoeCat17. It's amazing how much more space there is in frameless. The space difference is largest in drawers. They are both wider and deeper for the same size cabinet. One example for me is the wraps and baggies drawer. I can stand the sandwich baggie box upright without it getting smashed. This is in a 4-drawer cabinet.

Since you have the same cabinets in both styles, I would go to both showrooms and measure the storage (inside the drawers). Pick a base drawer cabinet in the same width with the same number of drawers. When I did this for a 3 drawer, the height difference was like getting another drawer (which is why I think 4-drawer cabinets are fine in frameless, but not so useful in framed).

Do you have limited storage or is your kitchen large with lots of cabinets? Measure your tall things that you would like to store in drawers. Will they fit in the framed drawers?

I don't think I would ever go back to framed (never say never). Only if I wanted inset. Why not get the extra space and flexibility?

Well sounds like frameless is the way to go.

pudgybaby...No, the kitchen I'm planning is not super large, so the more storage I can get the better.

So are there any *downsides* to choosing frameless over framed?

The downside to choosing frameless over framed is that you have to put up with a lot of fear-inducing discussion; people will talk about frameless as if it will collapse like a run of cardboard boxes would if they got wet. If you can feel fear and still proceed you are stronger than most humans. Congratulations on your decision. I hope you feel very scared now.

davidro1...LOL!! That is exactly my fear... like they will be flimsy and collapse or something!

Are there any measuring or installation issues that are specific to frameless?

The one thing I know of about frameless cabs is that you have to really fine-tune the drawer & doors. I had a LOVELY kitchen with a run of drawer bases (cherry slab 3-drawer units, two 36" & one 30" inch . . . man, how I miss those!), and it took the poor installer a LOOOOONG-O TIME-O to get the drawer faces aligned with one another.

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If you are buying full overlay doors, there is no need to buy a framed cabinet. Why put a front frame on a cabinet and cover it up? They will last just as long as framed, and you get a bit more space. The only difference in installation is to use a connecting bolt instead of a screw through the face frame. The install is no different then a framed cabinet with full overlay doors. One thing I love about installing frameless is the clip on hinge for door removal. I'm never a fan of removing a screw from wood and putting it back in the same hole when re-mounting the doors. The innermost/ design craft cabinets do have a wall cabinet mounting rail system, but it is not required.

My understanding is that frameless ARE indeed harder to install well than framed. I believe the issue is that you don't have a built-in piece (the frame) that you can modify (scribe) to match the installation conditions. Consequently, your measurements need to be that much more exacting. Of course, you probably will have a scribable filler piece next to the wall anyway, to provide some clearance.

I have only had frameless European cabinets. Everytime I am in a kitchen with framed cabinets, I am amazed at the wasted space.

They need to be installed with "exacting" standards. I suggest that you find installers that know how to do this well. My first frameless cabinets were 'cheap' and not installed well. The doors were always crooked. No matter what we did, we could not make those doors look straight. I think this is why frameless cabinets do not have a good reputation.

More exacting frameless cabinets hang them on the steel rail system, similar to Ikea. This makes the cabinets not move independent of each other and they stay "alinged" better in the long run.

You may also need more filler than with framed. The doors on framed cabs can often be adjusted so the exposed frame is used as "filler" and less loss of cabinet space. However, I suspect the added storage in each cabinet more than makes up for the need for filler in a few places!

Some frameless cabinets are built very strongly. Our DeWils cabinets have 5/8" plywood sides, bottoms and top rails. The plywood was very good quality too. It has been over 5 years since they have been installed so my memory is a little hazy, but IIRC, they had some corner blocking too. I couldn't get them to rack leaning on them before installation. The installers, had no trouble getting doors and drawer fronts aligned. A well built frameless cabinet can be about as strong as a framed one.

We love the storage, especially since our kitchen has lots of drawers. It is like having the storage of an extra drawer per stack - where our old kitchen had some 3 and 4 drawer stacks, we have some 4 and 5 drawer ones.

We do have a filler on the corner of our L so that the door handles on one side don't interfere with the drawers opening on the other side, but in the case of frameless, the drawers would still need the same clearance; it just would come from the frame instead of filler and one wouldn't have any wider drawer. It is only when one has a door cabinet that framed might get you a bit more space because you can use the storage behind the frame but not the storage behind a filler.

I must be missing something.

We are changing to frameless cabinets because of the look. We were at ikea today and measured this HUGE increase we are suppose to be getting only to find out the interior of the cabinets was SMALLER by a 1/4", not a lot but where is everyone getting they are larger???

Definitely FRAMELESS!!! After remodeling my kitchen with wonderful frameless cabinets, we moved and I ended up with a kitchen with framed builders grade cabinets! I miss the frameless!!!

aloha, I'm not sure what you are comparing, but if it is wall to wall interior, you may have a slightly smaller space because you have thicker sidewalls, which which give you a stronger cabinet box. The difference between 5/8 and 3/4" sides will give you 1/4 inch less on a box.
The usable difference comes when you look at the opening into the box. The frame is going to hang over the sides of the box and make the opening smaller. On the box itself, that may not be a lot, but it gives you a lip to lift dishes over on the bottom and to either avoid or tuck things behind on the sides. The biggest difference is with drawers. My old drawers lost maybe 1/4-1/3 of their space with framing and drawer glides.

someone could post a picture of drawers in a framed cabinet.

Lascatx. I don't have the measurements in front of me now but we measured our framed drawers and then went to IKEA yesterday and measured their frameless drawers and it was about 1/4 - 1/2" differenc at most in the width (neither of us remember). We were thinking what is the big deal!?

I agree that the full extension drawers give you MUCH better access to the interior drawers but this debate wasn't about the various hardware but framed vs frameless.

Like I said we are going frameless but I was disappointed to say the least that I wasn't getting all this great bonus storage.

Is it the gain in height (which I neglected to measure)that everyone is talking about the storage increase. I want to be elated too but I'm just not seeing it.

Here is a picture of drawers in our pre-remodel framed cabinets:

Here is a picture of a 4 drawer stack and a bit of a 5 drawer stack in our current frameless kitchen (the drawers aren't open, but there is nothing between the drawers in frameless so you get all the way to the top of the drawer front in usable space:

BTW, here are some drawers in the entertainment center cabinets that my husband built. They have a frame, but it isn't as wide as the frames on most commercially made cabinets and the frame doesn't go between the drawers. Cabinets made like these have almost as much drawer space as frameless, but I've never seen mass produced framed cabinets that do this:

went to IKEA yesterday and measured their frameless drawers and it was about 1/4 - 1/2" differenc at most in the width

What width did you measure? You need to measure the inside width of the drawer box. Also, are you sure the base units in question had the same overall width?

I measured the width of the interior drawer to drawer.

After your careful explanation I measured my existing cabinets compared to IKEA and it looks like I'll be able to utilize about 10% more usable space for the height. I didn't take note of that while at IKEA partially because on-line the picture looked like there were frames across between the drawers. When I looked at some with different fronts, it was much more apparent.

I measured the width of my existing ones and IKEA's are a shy 1" wider but they are also about 1" less in depth, making that a wash.

Though I'm happy with getting an unexpected 10% of usage, it doesn't account for some of the frameless claims of:

"it feels like my kitchen has doubled in size"

"This quadrupled the truly useable storage volume".

If you had framed and non full extension drawers I can understand how you can feel like the difference is huge. Being able to have a drawer full extend IMO gives you the most usable storage (on my drawers I'd gain another 3.5" of easily accessible storage. That will be very welcoming.

I think it's important to clarifying to mercymygft how much she is gaining by frameless and not mix it up with full extensions too.

Here is a link that might be useful: IKEA Interior Measurements

Some people did have a lot of wasted space in their framed cabinets. Back a couple years ago there were photos that illustrated it well. Some frames take more space than those shown above. In my case I quadrupled my storage because of several factors that add together with the one big factor of the several frames (stiles, vertical frames) all being eliminated. Now my drawers are all huge not tiny, and the interdrawer gap (also visible in the photos above) has been reduced to about 1/4" height. I used to have many small drawers. I used to have cabinets_with_doors, and inside these cabinets was one half shelf and one cabinet floor. Now I have four drawers inside every cabinet. YMMV and please disregard the claim of increasing real useable space by several hundred percent, if it doesn't apply to your situation.

Davidrol. From your explanation of what you had and how you changed it, it would indeed increase your usable space greatly.

I just think it's important to Mercymygft to understand how important each of the different characteristics changes the usable space. That is what she was asking about.

Your explanation said you changed to
1. Frameless drawers
2. More drawers
3. Full extensions (don't you too have IKEA?)

Each of those items increase your accessible storage. For the framed vs. frameless is was about 10% for my cabinets (I'm sure it can be +/- depending on what a person has).

The cabinets with drawers will increase the usability and then also the full extension.

Here is a link with pics of framed vs frameless. Is is easy to see how the frame of a framed cabinet takes up much more space on the height and width of a cabinet than the thicker sides of a frameless cabinet.

I do not understand how Ikea drawers can only be gaining such a small amount in the width of drawers on a cabinet that is the same width. You are comparing cabinets that are the same width, right, aloha?

Here is a link that might be useful: Pics of framed vs frameless

Framed cabinets can vary a lot in the width of the frames. The frames on our old cabinets above were a little over an inch wide, but I've seen ones where they were 2" or more. I recall an open house where they were huge, probably over several inches. It was an over 4000 sq ft spec house and my thought at the time was that it was a way for the spec house builder to spend less on the kitchen. It looked big an impressive but had less storage then a much smaller space without ridiculously large frames.

On our old cabinets, the frames didn't take much width, it was drawer height that they impacted more because they were site build cabinets with one frame going around adjacent drawer stacks. The frame between stacks in them was about the same width as the two side walls of our frameless cabinets. And the drawer glides were under the drawers rather than on the sides so they took away from drawer height, not width.

With that kind of construction, going from framed to frameless gains about 10% to 25% in drawer space. The gain is higher when one is doing more drawers in a stack.

Pudgybaby, I was as surprised as your are regarding the widths. My current cabinets are about 15 y.o. so that may account for why they are more efficient then a really old cabinet. They aren't anything fancy though. I'm thinking it doesn't save that much because you still have to attach the rails to something hence only the 1" I was VERY surprised though by the shallower drawers with IKEA...thank goodness they are full extentions.

Cloudswift, you are right that it depends on the construction methods. I wonder what the difference you would see from a new cabinet to new cabinet one being frameless and the other being framed would be. I'm guessing you wouldn't be any less then my 10% net but who knows. I wonder if anyone actually compared apples to apples.

"... I wonder if anyone actually compared apples to apples."
I'm certain many compared apples to apples. Some have exaggerated the gains and some have not. No big deal. Move on to the next topic.

I can't show you apples to apples of my kitchen, but I can point you in that direction.

This photo shows a single drawer in the new kitchen open. You can see that there is no frame taking space beyond the side of the box -- nothing above or below the drawer.

Now, look at these drawers in the old kitchen.

There is wasted space above, below and to the side of every drawer and door. It was a couple of inches. What you can't see is that when you opened the drawers, you still had the drawer glides and the box so that the interior of the drawer was a couple of inches smaller still. That was just one factor, and is was significant in my kitchen, but many other factors also contributed to making the kitchen look, feel and function much larger than the old kitchen. I'm one who has said I have twice the function and I'll stand by it. YMMV

lascatx...Thanks for the visual!

What is that in your drawer?? Spices? When I first looked at the picture I thought, Wow, that a lot of pill bottles!!

I just want to comment on Buehl's mention of possibly needing more filler with frameless. A lot of that depends on who is designing your cabinetry. We first went to HD, and the "KD" there used her HD software to design our kitchen. Whenever she didn't know what to do, or how to arrange something well, or fit something, she just stuck in filler. Our final design was not only full of filler pieces, it was more than we wanted to spend, and not an efficient utilization for our small kitchen. We then went to a local manufacturer, who makes semi-custom cabinets, and their KD was trained and experienced. No filler, and a great design, and the price ended up being lower than HD's, and used every inch for useful cabinetry. So, in my experience, the use of filler very much depends on the design, more than whether the cabinet is frameless.

We HAD to do frameless. Comparing our previous framed cabinetry with our current frameless shows a very significant increase in space, particularly the drawers. But whether one believes the space increase with frameless is 10% or 25%, we needed every bit of space that could be eked out. Plus we prefer the look. We installed it DIY, so I am not sure how supremely skilled you have to be to install frameless rather than framed. As a DIY, it was do-able.

Slightly OT, but I must address the spice drawer idea. We were very much influenced by a thread I will link below, that has all kinds of ideas for spice storage. We had not liked any of our previous kitchens' various spice storage. Then we saw the drawers by Cat_mom, Natal and Mysterymachine. DH thinks our spice drawer which copied theirs is one of the best parts of the entire kitchen. (sorry for the sidebar, but it's slightly related, as I don't think you can store as many bottles in framed drawers, as Lascatx has illustrated with her gorgeous drawer.)

Here is a link that might be useful: The Best Ever Spice Storage Thread