Drawers, drawers, drawers.

Regular cabinets: You have to get down on your knees to get stuff from the back and bring everything out, to stack your pots you have to bring the entire stack out and put them back in. With drawers, you just pull them out and see what you have in them, where everything is at a glance, reach in to take out what you need and you do this standing up. No more down on the knees.

Doors with pull-out shelves: To open and close these is a multi-step process. Open both doors fully, slide out the shelf, choose what you need, push the shelf back in completely and then close two doors again. IF you do not open the doors completely you may bang the shelf against the door and if you don;t close the shelf completely you will bang the door against them. If you have kids/teenagers who are always in a rush (or DH's) your doors will be banged up in no time. With drawers you just open the whole thing and (with soft-close mechanisms), take out what you need and just gently close the drawers again.

Drawers, drawers, drawers. The best decision I made. I have one small cabinets and there is scrap paper and phone books in it.

That was an easy decision for me. I have all drawers and I love it. So much easier.

Drawers, drawers, drawers.

I love all the drawers in my new kitchen.
But I am also very glad to have some base cabinets with drawers.
I have two base cabinets that are 36" wide and 18 inches deep:
one is for tray/baking sheet storage and one is for all the small appliances
that I don't use on a daily basis -- waffle iron, blender, electric rice cooker, etc.
I also appreciate the 48 inches wide base cabinet (only 9 inches deep)
with three shelves on the more visible side of my island.
This has locks and is where I keep all the wine and alcohol.

I think my lower cabinets with doors work as well
as they do because they are not the full 24 inches deep.

So, yes, the decision about drawers and cabinets was about function.
One of the many wonderful bits of advice I received on GW was to map out
where everything in the kitchen would go before ordering the cabinets.

I'm not getting new cabinets, but if I were, you bet most ALL would be DRAWERS! As others said, having to stand on your head to find what you are looking for is no fun!

Ditto: Drawers, drawers, drawers. We converted cabinets on each side of the range to drawers and I absolutely love them. For some reason it didn't occure to me to do more and now I really wish I had converted lots more else.

Blfenton gave the reasons, and it really is so much more convenient and quicker to deal with drawers.

Get down on all fours and root around in the dark, in each of your cabinets. Post again to describe how you feel.

With drawers here is what you do: you push them, and the drawers close "gently" all by themselves. You don't need to close them gently. Hip check them and they will survive. The stacked plates too. Drawers are now made that are idiotproof.

Decide what needs to be stored where based on your work zones (i.e. baking sheets in cooking/baking zone, prep bowls in prep zone, etc). That drives what kind of storage you need. For example, baking sheets store really well verically on their sides in either an upper cab over the oven or in a base cab. Most everything can be stored in drawers! Really!

Drawers rock. Use them whenever you can.

My cabs were just installed. I have 16 drawers in the bases, 2 lazy susan cabinets and 2 cabinets with pull outs. One pull out cabinet is under the cooktop for pots and pans and the other is holding all my seasonings and then cans and jars. I like the food pull outs for cans and small things. I can see them right away. I love my drawers for dishes, mixing bowls, salad bowls, paper goods and or course utensils and silverware. I don't have many upper cabs, just on 2 walls and they go up to the ceiling which I love. Have fun. I'm loving most of the reno. Just a few angry things.

My kitchen finished over the summer has almost all drawers. Almost all of the exceptions where I got talked into doors (most with roll outs) I now would gladly trade for drawers if I had it to do over again. The only exception for me is the need to have a place to store tall items like stock pots, etc.

Generally the height of a counter is 36" high. 4 drawers are going to be shallower. It's important to know what you are putting in them. Find out what your finished drawer height will be from your cabinet guy/company. I wanted one bank with 3 drawers so I could store my stock pot, large strainers etc.

In only one spot I did use a door/pullout combo. I was going to have more of an overhang on the dining table side of my counter. A drawer that went right up to that overhang would be awkward to open and shut, and hard to see into. The door and two pull-outs worked much better. Note that this was not so much for everyday items, but for waffle irons, and the like.

Drawers! I'm redoing small galley, but other than sink base and pantry with rollouts, there will only be 1 doored cabinet....it is 12" wide and a bank of only 12" drawers seemed impractical, so I am using it for cookie sheet /shallow pan storage...made better sense. Can't wait to no longer bend down and grope my way to the nether regions that are the backs of cabinets!

Intresting re:everyones drawer comments.

Care to share pics of all/most lower drawers?

All drawers here too. The only non-drawer base cab is the sink cab.
We did all wide 3 stacks except for one 18" 4 stack for silveware and other shallow stuff. The top drawers on the 3 stacks are all shallow too with 2 lower deep drawers.

If there is one true GW rule we can all agree on, it would be you should do as many drawers as possible ;)

Love my drawers! My contractor thought I was strange but I am so happy with them! It's definitely the way to go.

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@countrygirl217: thanks for the pics they do look good... i do have some huge pots (which now that i think about it are useless as i am getting induction and they fail magnet test).

I will have to see how much cost this would add. I was told it would be a lot more to do drawers all the way or part of the way vs just cabs.

I am just grateful I found GW and switched to all drawers before it was too late. Previously, I thought ROTS were sooooo much better than my old fixed shelves that I couldn't imagine anything better.

@Angie_DIY: ROTS?

Drawers for function most places but roll out shelves in our 12" wide cabinets partly for flexibility (able to adjust the roll out shelf heights) and partly because sheet pans and cooling racks work well with a door.

We just installed cabinets in our small galley kitchen and moved back into our kitchen last week (lots of other stuff yet to do, but most everything is back in place). Love my drawers, again thanks to GWers and a good friend who just built a new house and had all drawers. I have two 36-inch sets of drawers and one 30-inch. I did go with one 30-inch cabinet partly because I was afraid to commit totally to drawers but mainly to hold really tall items. Oh, I do have a 12-inch cab between the sink and DW, but I've got trays, cookie sheets standing in it. I love to go in and open and shut them all with the soft close. Anyway, do as many drawers as you can. You won't regret it.

ROTs= Roll Out Trays

Drawers!

DRAWERS Totally! They are the best! I only have standard doors on base cabinet under sink and flanking the range for balance and tray, cutting board storage. My pantry has doors with roll out drawers, this only works because I leave both doors open and pull out drawers while in cooking mode, then close up when finished, otherwise this would be a pain.

From Kitchen before and after

LOVE not getting on hands and knees to look for something. I have to say my most favorite drawer stack is facing my stove, it has all knives, utensils, pots and pans.

From Kitchen before and after

This is going to sound redundant...DRAWERS! Although I didn't go all drawers, I did start with all drawers in the plan. I altered the plan to make exceptions as needed. Other than my sink base, I have one doored unit with an adjustable shelf. This is for my oversized items like a steamer stack or even a lobster pot. I even added toe-kick drawers for even more storage.

cjc- your kitchen looks great! What color is on the walls?

On topic- DRAWERS!! And even have your garbage can set up as a tall drawer (basically a pullout door) so throwing away garbage is a one step process...

There is an added cost factor to drawers with more smaller fronts, more hardware, including glides, and the interior boxes. But they are generally much easier to access and use than deep base cabinets. Think of digging for that bowl or appliance in the back of the cabinet behind something else or looking at the wasted space because you don't want to stack things in front of other things. Compare that to the ease of getting clothes out of dresser drawers (Unless you just cram stuff in, and that's another problem drawers vs doors won't solve).

Everything that touches the floor in my kitchen pulls out, excluding only my sink bases and the 13" deep cabinets across the back of my island which are also very easy access for small appliances and such. I switched a step in pantry to cabinets and went with a pullout tower and a door cabinet with roll outs to have a variety of storage options. I use the pullout tower for bottles and cans and the rollouts for boxes and bags. The only place I have to make an effort to reach things are the stacked cabinets above my fridge, pantry and the one above the baking sheets and such that are already above my ovens. These are stacked to a 10 foot ceiling -- there would be none with 8 foot ceilings, with the possible exception of something in the back of an above fridge cabinet.

It's kind of a pain, but you really have to look at all the things you have or expect top have in your kitchen and figure out where they are going to make sense and what makes them easy to use. If needed, then you tweak for appearance. That was our approach, and I'm happy. I will say 13" deep uppers (Brookhaven) are great.

"And even have your garbage can set up as a tall drawer (basically a pullout door) so throwing away garbage is a one step process..."

Oh yeah, I forgot about that in my kitchen too. So half of my sink base is a drawer. The other side just swings open conventionally for access to the water systems.

Emilner, Thank you! the walls are BM Fieldstone, a gray/green. It matches perfectly with the BM Bleeker Beige in the family room open to the kitchen...

Hi Desertsteph,

Thanks for showing us how well trays and cookie sheets work in a drawer.

Here is our storage in a regular lower cabinet with doors.
(Yes, this post is really just a chance to show our cat
happily exploring the new kitchen after his four tortuous months of house renovations.)

My cabinets with doors were quite a bit less costly than drawers.
I wonder what others found the price difference between base cabinets with doors vs drawers to be?

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We had all lower doors, then one year my in-laws gave us the gift of roll-out-trays. What an improvement! Now we have new cabs with all drawers except for the corner super susan, the sink base, and the pantry. What an improvement!

Our pantry is a 27" cabinet with roll out trays up to about my eyeballs, and a separate top section with fixed shelves. This works well for us. I got new Oxo storage containers to keep stuff neat and that works pretty well too. The upper section is high enough that I have to get out the step stool to reach anything above the front of the bottom shelf. Needless to say, I don't keep frequently used items up there. In fact, the topmost shelf is where I put my canning stuff (not the pressure cooker though, it's in the super susan).

I love having a VARIETY of cabinets. I love matching what I'm storing to the cabinet. I don't ALWAYS want a drawer!!!!

Hoops can be jumped through to make drawers work in almost every situation. Why bother??? I personally, after living with lots and lots of drawers for 6 years in our redone kitchen, get tired of constantly opening and closing drawers, especially if they are heavy (such as my pots and pans drawers and my pyrex container drawers). I LOVE the few alternative cabinets I have: a fixed shelf cabinet, a shallow fixed shelf cabinet, 2 super susan cabinets, and some roll out shelves. I would never trade any of them for a drawer cabinet.

The all drawer kitchen is not a new concept. A friend of mine put one in 25 years ago. I had a lot of time to mull over the idea but I decided I really did not like the lack of flexibility. And I didn't want to have to stand on my head to make a drawer work. My friend, fortunately, had a closet near by with SHELVES to catch any items she couldn't fit into a drawer. Many people have walk in pantries or extra shelves in a laundry room that serve the same purpose.

I didn't have any alternative storage nearby and I wanted to build some flexibility into my kitchen so that I could change some shelves and roll outs to make things fit. Sometimes the shelves in upper cabinets just aren't deep enough and space in a base cabinet is necessary. Drawers and roll outs eat up space and the full depth of the cabinet box. A roll out can be taken out and replaced by a shelf but a drawer can't.

I do have lots and lots of drawers but sometimes a drawer isn't optimal. Drawers only offer a top down view, they have sides that need to be maneuvered around, they can get heavy, they are fixed in size and can never be changed (with some work the insides can be reconfigured but they can never be made deeper), and, for me, they aren't as easy to use as a simple door.

I love having different plates mixed into my stack of plates. For me, an upper shelf works a lot better than a drawer would. I have a similar situation with my pie plates--I keep the stack on a roll out so that I can see them from the side. And I'm not sorry to avoid more heavy drawers--they glide easily (but I think there has been a change over 6 years) but the weight is still felt.

The fixed shelf cabinet in my work zone is ideal for my oversized stainless steel mixing bowls. I use them a lot and I prefer opening a door and grabbing rather than pulling open a drawer. I like seeing the view from the side and grabbing a bowl out from the middle of the stack without having the drawer front interfering.

I like having roll outs for many of the same reasons. I keep large stock pots and small appliances on roll outs because I don't like being restricted by drawer sides when maneuvering them.

When planning our kitchen I realized there were some items I used rarely and I didn't need them at my fingertips 24/7. These are the items I placed in the backs of the fixed shelves and roll outs. Organizing this way means I rarely have to pull items off a shelf to get at another or open up a door and roll out a shelf. I can just open a door and grab, very simple. I arranged the roll outs in our pantry cabinet and baking cabinet in a similar manner. The items I use 80-90% of the time are at the front.

Drawer people are very vocal but I don't necessarily think it's the common factor in gw kitchens. Thought and attention to detail is thing that binds the kitchens. It seems like just about everybody comes up with a final product that suits them and their budget. A kitchen doesn't have to be drawer heavy to be just right.

I'm not at all anti-drawer. I love drawers and I'm glad I put a lot of them in! However, I think a very one sided view is often given where only the positives of drawers are touted and the negatives of other cabinets are emphasized. All cabinets have positives and negatives and it's important to consider them all to come up with an appropriate mix in each individual kitchen.

ROTS = Roll Out Tray Shelf

Drawers for the vast majority of uses.

Regarding the "disadvantage" of high sides to a drawer, it's actually an advantage in most cases, IMHO, when discussing drawers vs ROTS for framed cabinets. With short-sided ROTS, anything that sticks out past the sides (accidentally or otherwise) will get caught on the cabinet frame when the ROTS is pulled out and will likely "ding" the frame. Drawers keep things corralled inside the "open" space in a cabinet. (This is also true to some extent for frameless, but instead of hitting the cabinet frame, the door is hit if it doesn't open flush with the side of the cabinet.)

Also, if you plan to get ROTS, check your cabinetmaker, some are not adjustable. Most are, but a few are not.

I have mostly drawers & pullouts ("shelves" attached to the door so they pull out when the door is open) - the only exceptions are the two sink bases and the Pet Center cabinet. The former are "regular" cabinets (although the prep sink is a 36" corner sink base), the latter is a cabinet w/a top drawer and two ROTS. The only cabinet I regret is the one with the ROTS! I meant to order it as a combination cabinet - bottom as a pullout (similar to trash pullouts) + one ROTS inside that, but I was so focused on the cabinets facing into the kitchen that I forgot (it faces outside the kitchen)!

Some here (Plllog, for one) even have drawers in their corners. I think I would prefer a corner susan over corner drawers, but I'm not sure since I've never "seen" corner drawer and, from what I remember reading, you cannot get full-extension drawers for the corner. Corner susans have the advantage that everything is always right in front of you, in the opening...just rotate the shelf(ves) and whatever you want to access is right in front of you!

As to cost, drawers are not always more expensive, when I compared the cost of my 27" three-drawer base to my 27" cabinet w/two ROTS + top drawer, the drawer base was actually less expensive. The base cost of the ROTS cabinet cost 27% more than the same for the drawer base.

Lots of drawers in the lower cabinets of our new kitchen, too. 36 drawers of varying sizes, 2 double trash pullouts, 2 doors with tray dividers, 2 corner susans, and 6 doors with pull out trays. I did the pull out trays mainly for the heavier small appliances I don't use often, and it works for us. I think it's easier to lift them from a pull out rather than a deep drawer. These are on the far side of the kitchen, not directly in the "working" area. Personal preference I guess. I kind of wish I had done pull out trays under the sink, too. So much stuff gets stuck in the back, and I have to get on my hands and knees to get at it. May still add them.

Versatility...since I first moved back into my kitchen in July 2008, I've changed my drawers around many times and I've never had a problem fitting anything in the various drawers.

Here is an "inside look" at what I store in my cabinet drawers (the many, many ways a drawer can be used )...Inside the Drawers

I did want to mention that Zelmar does have a good point about versatility in general and having a separate pantry in particular...I do have a separate pantry where I store the majority of my small appliances. While I do store some in drawers (my "gluten-free" appliances like toaster, waffle iron, mixer bowl, etc.), I think most are best stored either on open shelves in a pantry or shelves in a shallow cabinet (like 12" to 15" deep). If you have a corner cabinet, then a corner susan is also a great place to store small appliances b/c they will always be "in front", as I mentioned previously, and b/c you have the full height of the cabinet to work with (i.e., no "top drawer" to take away space). (Corner susans are also a great place to store pots & pans, for the same reasons.)

Drawers--definitely drawers.

As others have pointed out, there may be specific items you want in a cabinet, but drawers are much easier to access. In the main part of my kitchen, I have 5 drawers stacks (plus drawers under the ovens), 1 pull out trash, 2 super lazy susans (which I like, although I know many people hate), one narrow tray cabinet, and a sink cabinet.

My whole family loves the drawers--2 for pots and pans, one for strainers, one for measuring items, one for small appliances, one for linens, one for spices...

I also have 12" deep cabinets on the dining side of my peninsula. Those are really convenient for the china, party serving items (ice bucket, flatware baskets), and for some reason, the plastic ware is there, but I'm going to move it.

Since they're only 12" deep, I can see and reach everything when I open the doors.

I wouldn't swap *any* of my drawers for cabinets. If I were having totally custom cabinets done, I'd probably do some slightly different drawer configurations, but I'd still go with drawers.

Mostly DRAWERS! And then a cabinet or two with shelves for those things that won't fit in the drawers--at least that is what works for us.