Those who do know shit about tools

[IStream]

Miele should stick to dishwashers and vacuum cleaners.

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Years ago I was told to use plain woods to show exotic joinery and plain joinery to show off exotic wood.
I feel like there's some of that thinking going on with this brilliant drawer detail.

 

[Diarmuid]

Drawer in drawer, sometimes called a 'till' (as in 'cash register till'). I do some of those -- most recently a pullout knife block above a spatula drawer. Also nifty for pan lids:

But it requires extra motions & sometimes you are better off just doing a normal progressive drawer distribution. Instead of putting a 4" drawer inside a 10" drawer front, just make individual 4" and a 6" drawers. My typical top drawer front is 6", with DB4 divided 6/7.25/7.25/9.5; DB3 is 6/12/12.

 

[Leeroy Jenkins]

@Diarmuid do buy your veneered panels as 4 X 8 sheets off the rack or have them laid up?

 

[Diarmuid]

Mostly stock. Had a few figured khaya (African mahogany) panels custom made, but my vendors can get most species in most grades, or order partial units with sufficient lead time. Should mention that pan lid photo was stolen from Pinterest. I'm terrible at/about photographing my own work. By the time a cabinet job is installed & populated, I never want to look at it again.

Spent the last couple days parting out 4x10' sheets of 3/4" MDF core. Ibuprofen -- it's what's for dinner!

 

[Ease the sheet.]

Nothing like a well designed kitchen. Or any workspace, really.

If only the users would actually use it as designed!

 

[4ktsb]

c

Ikea?

 

[Mrleft8]

Ikea?

Not with K&V drawer slides

 

[Diarmuid]

Nothing like a well designed kitchen. Or any workspace, really.

If only the users would actually use it as designed!

It's down to the designer to listen to the clients and ask good questions. I just spent two hours on the phone going over kitchen plans with some friends; I built their cabinets here in Laramie b4 they moved out of state, and they want me to do the kitchen in their new home too. They sent me some CAD plans that are okay, but clearly drawn by someone who does not cook as hard as my friends cook. (Never met an architect that can lay out a kitchen. One assumes they eat a lot of take-out.) So we moved appliances around, changed drawer sizes and distributions, went thru convenience hardware options, increased upper cabinet depth, etc.

You can (and sometimes should) steer clients toward good design choices, but you also need to listen to their preferences and vision. These folks want painted cabinets, which probably means I won't be building them (I'm about done spraying colored lacquer, blech); but that's what they see in their mind's eye, so.... We can at least put the dishwasher on the correct side of the sink and fix that terrible window-wall cabinet distribution.

 

[Ed Lada]

I don't know why people in the US want a huge kitchen, other than if they want to have a big table in it to eat meals. To me efficiency is important, I don't need roller skates to get from the fridge to the stove.

My kitchen is 10'x10' with a 3'x5' pantry room just out of sight on the left. I designed the layout, it was built and installed by a kitchen cabinet company. The cabinets are nothing special. At least the doors and drawer fronts are solid wood anyway. The counter tops are local granite. The kitchen is small but I have a lot of useful counter space and plenty of cupboards as well as a dishwasher. The fridge and the freezer are on the right behind the doors, the freezer is on the bottom. Small refrigerators and freezers are the norm in Europe.

I can stand in front of the stove on the island and with minimal movement I can reach 90% of what I need. I've cooked for as many as 60 people in that kitchen without any trouble. There is a sink on the island and there's another one in the back corner where you can just see the corner of the dish drainer peeking out. The dining room table is just on the other side of the blue rug runner in the lower right.

 

[SloopJonB]

The big kitchen thing is a response to the fact that everyone ends up in the kitchen at parties.

 

[Liquid]

^ Totally agree. Here's a little kitchen I did: Only ~$8K in cabinets and still too much storage space for that 2 - 1 craftsman. I've seen kitchen islands that are hard to reach the middle of...

 

[Liquid]

The big kitchen thing is a response to the fact that everyone ends up in the kitchen at parties.

Even with a very open, open floor plan the kitchen always has the most gravity! Might have to do with food...

 

[Diarmuid]

I don't know why people in the US want a huge kitchen, other than if they want to have a big table in it to eat meals. To me efficiency is important, I don't need roller skates to get from the fridge to the stove.

My kitchen is 10'x10' with a 3'x5' pantry room just out of sight on the left. I designed the layout, it was built and installed by a kitchen cabinet company. The cabinets are nothing special. At least the doors and drawer fronts are solid wood anyway. The counter tops are local granite. The kitchen is small but I have a lot of useful counter space and plenty of cupboards as well as a dishwasher. The fridge and the freezer are on the right behind the doors, the freezer is on the bottom. Small refrigerators and freezers are the norm in Europe.

I can stand in front of the stove on the island and with minimal movement I can reach 90% of what I need. I've cooked for as many as 60 people in that kitchen without any trouble. There is a sink on the island and there's another one in the back corner where you can just see the corner of the dish drainer peeking out. The dining room table is just on the other side of the blue rug runner in the lower right.

View attachment 570618

My kitchen is 8'x9'.

28" fridge, 21" range, 18" dishwasher (which is rarely used).

Having worked in restaurants, you learn to stow everything you need within one step -- or better yet, no steps. If you have to run for the mayonnaise, you'll be absolutely wrecked at the end of your shift. Most commercial kitchens I've worked in are smaller than most residential kitchens I build. You have four people feeding seventy, and every ten square feet given to the kitchen is one fewer table to generate cash.

This current thing I'm designing is 21'x28' and includes both a dining table and an 8'x5' island. The longer wall has an 18' cabinet run. And yet it has only about five upper cabinets and we're trying to figure out where to store the plates. That Euro 'wall of appliances' kitchen I mentioned has two wall ovens, built-in coffee maker, warming drawer, two zone beverage/wine chiller, and television -- but no/none/zero independent upper cabinets at all. In the entire kitchen.

We had to build, no shit, a second "butler's kitchen" backing up against the main kitchen to store the dishware in.

 

[IStream]

People are idiots.

 

[Glenn McCarthy]

Saw this in a YouTube video. Pure genius. 4 days later I installed them on my pots and pan doors.

 

[Diarmuid]

Lots of fun storage options out there, tho not everyone's lids are as uniform as shown:

 

[chester]

Saw this in a YouTube video. Pure genius. 4 days later I installed them on my pots and pan doors.

View attachment 570731

View attachment 570732

you need to account for lost shelf space. those hinges were in our house, built '55-56.

 

[tybee]

that type of hinge inhales vigorously.

 

[Diarmuid]

Full overlay doors on face frames -- whatcha gonna do? I had to use those on a recent job b/c I was matching an existing cabinet style. My preference is for barrel-body Euro hinges, but they require shimming, or a huge range of baseplate heights, or FF mounting plates which are about as bad as those compact hinges shown.

I (typically) refuse to build overlay on FF cabinets. Frameless, inset, or a sort of hybrid style that looks like FF but isn't really. Partly b/c the hardware problems that arise. You end up hanging drawer slides on those silly rear brackets.