Kitchen Cabinet Storage Ideas That Come Built In

Open the drawer you hate. Everybody has one. Maybe it is the drawer by the stove that jams on a spatula handle every single time. Maybe it is the cabinet where the roasting pan lives behind the waffle iron you have not touched in four years. You have fought that cabinet for a decade and the cabinet keeps winning.

Here is the part most people miss. That is not a space problem. It is a cabinet problem, and cabinets can be fixed. The moment they get fixed is the moment you order new ones, because Medallion builds the storage into the cabinet itself. Roll-outs, pull-outs, dividers, lift doors, a step stool hidden in the toe kick. We laid the whole catalog out on our cabinet storage solutions page. This post is the walk-through.

Storage Is Usually the Real Reason

Families come into the showroom talking about color. Door style, finish, whether the island should be a different shade. Then we ask what bugs them about the kitchen they have now, and the answer is almost always storage. In our showroom experience it is the leading reason a family remodels a kitchen at all. That is not a survey we are quoting. It is what we hear at the desk, week after week, from Winter Haven to Lakeland.

Three Storage Problems We Have Already Covered

The pantry question comes first. A walk-in room or a tall cabinet, and the honest answer depends on whether you have square footage to give up. We settled that whole trade-off in walk-in pantry vs. pantry cabinet, so we will not re-argue it here.

Then the corner, which every L-shaped kitchen has and every L-shaped kitchen loses things in. Medallion's answer is the Blind Corner Base with Pull-out Storage, and the full comparison against a lazy Susan or a blocked-off dead corner lives in corner cabinet solutions.

Third is the sink base, the hardest-working cabinet in the house and the one that meets every slow leak. If yours has already swollen at the bottom, start with the swollen cabinet under the sink. If you are building new, the Sink Base with Sink Mat and Two Door Organizers puts a protective mat on the cabinet floor and racks on both doors, and Pull-out Waste Containers put the trash behind a smooth-glide front instead of beside your leg.

Drawers and Roll-Outs: The Deepest Part of the Catalog

One idea runs through this entire group. Stop reaching into the cabinet. Make the cabinet come out to you. A door with a fixed shelf behind it asks you to kneel, aim a flashlight, and pull three things out to reach the fourth. A roll-out tray hands you the back row while you are still standing up. When we went through Medallion's storage catalog product by product to build the storage page, this one group alone ran to twenty-eight items. A few that earn their spot:

• Deep Drawer: oversized and smooth-gliding, sized for the stock pot and the mixing bowls that fit nowhere else
• Roll-out Trays: the simplest upgrade there is, shelves that slide forward so the back row finally sees daylight
• Base with Deep Roll-Out Trays: the same trick in a full base cabinet, deep enough for the pots you cook with weekly
• Cookware Organizer: dividers and pull-out shelving that keep pots, pans, and lids separated instead of nested
• Spice Drawer Base: angled tiers that keep every label facing up, so the cumin is never hiding behind the cinnamon
• Peg Board Drawer Organizer: movable wood pegs that hold plates and bowls in whatever layout your dishes need
• Tiered Cutlery Divider Drawer: two levels of silverware in one drawer, with better visibility than a flat tray
• Knife Drawer Insert: slotted storage that protects the blades and gets the block off your counter
• Pull-Out Work Surface: extra counter that slides out when you need it and tucks back flush when you do not

The same idea scales up to the tall cabinets. A Tall Cabinet with Deep Roll-Out Trays puts extra-deep trays in a full-height pantry, so nothing hides behind the front row. A Custom Tall Cabinet with Adjustable Tray Divider Storage stands bakeware and cutting boards upright instead of stacking them flat. A Bake Center with Pocket Doors leaves the mixer set up and ready, then hides the whole station behind doors that slide back into the cabinet instead of swinging into the room.

Appliance Garages and Lift Doors

Counter clutter is a storage problem wearing a disguise. The blender, the toaster, the air fryer, and the coffee maker all live on the counter because the alternative is hauling them out of a low cabinet twice a day. An appliance garage gives them a home at counter height, behind a door, still plugged in.

• Appliance Garage with Easy Lift Up Door: the door lifts straight up, so the toaster stays put and out of sight
• Counter Wall with Vertical Lift Door Appliance Garage: the same concealed spot built into the counter wall
• Built-In Microwave Cabinet: the microwave joins the cabinet line instead of eating counter space or hanging over the range
• Wall Lift and Stay: a wall-cabinet door that lifts up and holds itself open, hands-free
• Vertical Lift Door: opens overhead instead of swinging into the room, which matters at the end of a run where a swinging door meets a forehead

The Clever Stuff

A step stool hidden in the toe kick

The Step Stool Base is a pull-out step built into the toe kick under a base cabinet. Slide it out, step up, reach the top shelf. No chair dragged across the room. No standing on an open drawer front and hoping. If anybody in your house is short, or the cabinets run all the way to a nine-foot ceiling, this one sells itself in about four seconds on the showroom floor.

A drawer that charges the phones

The Mobile Devices Charging Drawer has USB and standard outlets built inside it. Phones and tablets charge in the drawer with the cords out of sight. The counter by the back door stops being a nest of chargers and half-dead cables. You close the drawer and the kitchen looks like a kitchen again.

A hamper behind a cabinet front

The Tilt-Down Hamper looks like an ordinary cabinet front. Tilt it down and a hamper basket is waiting behind it. It lands most often in a laundry room or a mudroom, and it turns a plastic basket that lives on the floor into something you never have to look at.

Paper towels, hidden and one pull away

The Paper Towel Pull out mounts the roll inside the cabinet on a smooth-glide front. Pull, tear, push it back. The roll stays clean, the counter stays clear, and nobody knocks it into the sink. It is a small thing. Small things are what you touch forty times a day.

A feeding station for the dog

The Pet Feeding Station builds the food and water bowls into a base cabinet, tucked into the cabinet line instead of parked in the middle of the floor where you kick them at six in the morning. We are partial to this one. Around here the dogs get a vote.

Designed In at the Order, Not Bolted On Later

This is the part that should change how you shop. None of these are accessories you pick up at the end and strap into an old cabinet. They get specified when the cabinets are ordered. The roll-out is built to the width of that opening. The tray divider is cut for that cabinet. The step stool is part of the base. Everything is sized to your kitchen from the first drawing, which is why the finished job reads as cabinetry instead of an add-on.

It also means the decision has a deadline. A few pieces can be added later when the opening width and the door swing cooperate. Plenty cannot. A step stool base, a charging drawer with outlets inside it, a corner drawer, and a pocket-door cabinet are all built into the box at the factory. So raise your storage headaches early, back when you are still working out the layout and standard cabinet sizes, not after the order goes in.

How We Plan Storage at the Design Appointment

Come in with a list of annoyances. Not a wish list of products. A list of what makes you mad. I cannot reach the back of the corner. The lids avalanche every time. There is nowhere for the mail. Translating that into cabinet parts is our job, and it is the best hour of the whole project.

• Walk us through a normal day: where you cook, where the groceries land, who unloads the dishwasher
• Name the five things that bug you most, in order, worst one first
• Pull the trays and spin the lazy Susans yourself. Our 8,000 square feet at 1507 Havendale Blvd NW exists so you can open things before you buy them
• We mark the storage on the drawing, cabinet by cabinet, before anything gets priced
• Then we measure the room ourselves, so the order matches the walls you actually have and not the walls the plan assumed

Frequently Asked Questions

Does built-in storage cost a lot more?

Each piece adds to the cabinet price, and the spread is wide. A drawer divider is small money. A blind-corner pull-out mechanism is not. The honest way to handle it is to fix your worst three problems and let the rest go. We price these line by line so you can see what each one costs before you commit. Our kitchen cabinet cost guide puts the whole budget in context, and financing with 12 and 24-month no-interest specials can fold it into the project.

Can I add these to the cabinets I already have?

Some of them, sometimes. Roll-out trays and certain pull-outs retrofit when the opening width and the door swing allow it. Anything built into the box does not. That covers corner drawers, the step stool base, pocket-door cabinets, and any drawer with wiring in it. Send us a photo and a tape measure reading and we will tell you which side of that line your kitchen falls on.

What if my storage problem is not on this list?

Ask anyway. What is written up here and on the storage page is a sample of the catalog, not all of it. Bring us the problem and odds are good Medallion already makes something for it. If nothing fits, we will tell you that straight instead of selling you the closest thing on the shelf.

Who installs all this?

The installers we train and certify set the cabinets and the storage inside them, and alignment is what makes a pull-out last. A mechanism set a sixteenth of an inch out of square starts binding inside a year. Residential work carries our residential labor warranty, which is one of the best in the industry, and we are glad to walk you through what it covers before you order anything.

The Bottom Line

Storage is fixable. Not with bins and hacks, but with cabinets that were built to hold what you own. Roll-outs and deep drawers bring the back of the cabinet forward. Appliance garages and lift doors clear the counter. The clever pieces, the step stool and the charging drawer and the hamper and the pet station, quietly end an annoyance you assumed was permanent. All of it gets decided at the order, so bring your list to the design appointment while everything is still on paper.

Thank you for reading this far. You had plenty of other places to look this up, and we are grateful you spent the time with us instead. Come see us at 1507 Havendale Blvd NW in Winter Haven, call (863) 294-7355, or reach out here and we will set up a time. We have been helping Winter Haven families sort out their kitchens since 1962, and a cabinet you have been fighting for ten years is exactly the kind of problem we like.