Extreme cabineting

When your space is crazy deep or too shallow and feels impossible to work with.

I’ve mentioned before how challenging I find deep cabinets and closets. This has actually become a recurring theme around here.

It’s a tough problem. At first you think: Sweet, so much space for THINGS!

But then, items start disappearing into the black hole that invariably forms at the back. You find yourself buying duplicates or breaking a sweat digging deeper and deeper into the recesses of the space, until you finally give up and make peace with just not knowing what’s back there.

When we bought our new house and were in the early stages of remodel planning, I knew we’d chosen the right architect when she suggested we just wall off the back of a couple of the weirdly deep closets in the house (“I find very deep spaces unhelpful.” Amen, sister!). She also made the ingenious suggestion to add shallow cabinets along a formerly unused kitchen wall.

So this episode of Your House Machine is about Very Deep Cabinets and Very Shallow Cabinets. A veritable Country Mouse/City Mouse story playing out inside my organizing-obsessed brain.

Very Shallow Cabinets

First up, the Very Shallow Cabinets. Behold, the aforementioned useless wall when we bought the house. Look at it, pointlessly sitting there doing nothing besides holding up the house:

Under our eminently practical architect’s expert guidance, we widened the doorway and shifted it about a foot over to put that wall to work (among, err, a few other changes):

And here’s a peek inside the shallow cabinets:

Plenty of space for one-deep snacks.

If you don’t have the ability to move doorways and build out new cabinets, I am endlessly charmed when people use the cavity of their walls to create little shallow storage spaces:

The recessed medicine cabinet and drywall shelves both make use of the wall cavity. Source unknown, sadly.

You didn’t realize there was cabinet space INSIDE YOUR WALLS, did you?

If you’re a renter or otherwise not inclined to tear into your house, I’m always impressed with IKEA hacks using their famously shallow shoe cabinets, a la:

Source

Very Deep Cabinets

I’ve been plagued with super deep cabinets before, so this isn’t my first time at the rodeo.

I’ve done deep research into how one uses these deep spaces—meaning I asked a few highly organized friends—and the universal consensus is you have to abandon a portion of the space, or else add a slider doo-hickey that lets you bring the deeper space out into the light. Sometimes both. I’ll illustrate.

1. Abandon part of the space

   My friend recently went to war with her extra-deep pantry and ended up abandoning 1/3 of the hard to reach space. She also came up with a brilliant rule for the rest of it: Nothing touches the shelf. Absolutely everything must be in a clear bin or lazy Susan, thematically grouped. This isn’t performative bin usage; it’s strategic. This way, she has to pull out the entire bin to get to an item, a useful reminder about what’s in there, and nothing is lost to the black hole in the back. Single items are vulnerable to the pull of the black hole, but lo, there’s safety in numbers.

2. Organizer doo-hickey

Source

These sliders bring the deep cabinet out into the light. They’re not my favorite solution, but they do work for certain items. I’m currently trying to repurpose a cabinet like the one pictured above as a linen closet and let me tell you, it’s not working.

There are a few other strategies you can apply, which I detail in his roundup:

The ultimate guide to making extra-deep spaces functional

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I was going to wrap this up with an amazing analogy to the moral of the Country Mouse/City Mouse story, but Google tells me the moral of that story is that it’s better to live simply than to have excitement and luxury. I think once you’ve entered a discussion this long about cabinet depth, the ship has sailed on excitement.

So in a way, maybe this is a decent analogy: if a super deep cabinet is bumming you out, it can be better to abandon [some of] it than spend your one precious life trying to wrangle it. If you need a little spot to stick a few things, build into the wall rather than on top of it. In some way, perhaps these simple solutions can feel like a simpler life.

Let me know your thoughts on cabinet depth — do you ruminate about this as much as I do??

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