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melanie_bb86

Need advice for kitchen cabinet challenges

5 years ago



We are looking to update our cabinets but don’t want to do a full remodel. Our plan was to replace the upper cabinets with cream colored cabinets and refinish the frame (some sort of sage green) of the bottom cabinets and replace the drawer fronts and doors and put in hidden hinges. Our first thought was to go with cabinets and drawers with minimal gaps/frame showing, but have some issues with the bottom cabinets and are not sure what to do. There are two corners that will seem to leave unavoidable gaps. One corner has a lazy Susan, so there will be a gap between that and the adjacent cabinet doors. The other corner has drawers that will interfere with opening if the drawer fronts are made larger. Any ideas? Would it be weird to have the drawer fronts off center from the drawer box to close the gap some? in that case any handle would be centered on the drawer front but off center relative to the drawer box. Or should we just have gaps and do the same with the upper cabinets?

Comments (9)

  • 5 years ago

    For your lazy Susan cabinet, get a fold out door. It has two hinge sets. Thus removes all gaping and it looks like two independent doors.


    The other is more complicated. You can increase the door/drawer fronts but you would have to create more gaps (partial false fronts) or increase the between the two to increase the drawer fronts only.


    Depending on your budget, I'd either keep those as they are or hire a carpenter to retrofit it with three corner pull out drawers or another fold out door.




  • 5 years ago

    What condition are the base cabinets in? Are they worth all the time, effort, and money it will take to do everything you want? A professional paint job is not cheap. Add the cost of new doors/drawer fronts, etc., and I suspect you will be approaching the same cost as it would be to replace the cabinets.

    Perhaps one of the Pros will chime in with info on a cost/benefit analysis of what you're planning.

    Personally, I would probably wait a couple of years until I had saved up enough to do it right -- including fixing any layout issues (if there are any). Alternatively, I might consider painting the upper cabinets and replacing the base cabinets to get more up-to-date functionality (e.g., all drawers vs doors, internal accessories, etc.).

  • 5 years ago

    For the drawers at the corner, assuming you are ok with your drawer fronts being offset from your drawer boxes (which seems like it would be fine), you can fill in at the corner by adding some filler strips that match your doors.

    Here’s a random Houzz pic I grabbed where they did this at the corner of both the upper and lower cabinets:

  • 5 years ago

    With those drawer corners, your drawer front will need to clear, not just the door 90 degrees from it, but also the handles on the door/drawers.

    This might limit your handle options depending on how large the current drawer boxes and how close to the corner they get? Or you might need to put less wide drawer boxes in?

  • PRO
    5 years ago

    IMO by the time you pay for new doors, new uppers all new hinges and painting you could have a new kitchen with much better storage with all base cabinets changed to drawers and BTW those corner drawers pictured are IMO a complete wastwe of space they hold about 1/3 of what a lazy susan holds . IMO wait until you can afford a real redo of the space

  • 5 years ago

    No matter how you do the drawer fronts in the corner you won’t have enough space to add handles.

  • 5 years ago

    I love my corner cabinet hinged door. Have had the same in 2 houses over 20 years. I do not have the lazy susan feature! Why? I fins having a top recessed corner interior shelf is perfect to store less-used items, some very large, and I can best utilize those deep recesses. Also, I do not “lose” items that fall off the lazy susan. When remodeling our newest home, the cabinet supplier orderd lazy susan and I made them change it, since that was not the order. OK, back to your dilemma, wait until you can do a full kitchen change out and visit lots of showrooms, model homes for ideas.

  • 5 years ago

    Thank you everyone. I have a lot to think about. I’ve never liked our kitchen, but there’s no way to improve the layout without tearing out the wall to our formal dining room. And its too narrow for an island. So we have to work with the space we have.

  • 5 years ago
    last modified: 5 years ago

    Modern corner susans no longer have an issue with items falling off the shelves. The cabinet walls follow the contour of the shelves so closely that nothing larger than a grain of rice could fall off. There may be some out there that are the older style (probably builder grade), but most are not.

    The builder-grade cabinets in our old Kitchen, installed in 1995, had the "newer" type. Nothing ever fell off b/c there wasn't any room for falling! That lazy susan held all our pots & pans and larger serving pieces -- it held a lot!

    Another option for corner susan storage is small appliances. The taller space and the fact that everything is always in front and easy to access also makes it a good option for small appliances.

    A corner susan can be very useful for those who cannot afford to lose any storage in their Kitchen, especially if they cannot afford to lose storage for items used fairly frequently.