We're at a similar stage with our kitchen and found this past GW post to be abundantly helpful: Everything I Wanted to Know About Drawers. So much good information here! HTH

Edited to add: ...and DEFINITELY read through Buehl's terrific New to Kitchens post, particularly the "Storage...What to Store Where" section.

We remodeled our kitchen last year and the one regret I have is the two base cabinets that I have that are not drawers! If I had it to do over again, I would have all drawer bases except the sink base and corner cabinet.. I currently have a 30 inch 3 drawer base cabinet and a 24 inch microwave cabinet with a deep drawer below, as well as narrow drawers in the 3 remaining cabinets. I store my large utensils and kitchen gadgets in the top drawer of the 30 inch, dishes in the middle drawer and my baking supplies in the bottom drawer. The drawer under the microwave drawer holds all my plastic leftover containers. I am amazed at how much I can store in those draws and how much more organized my kitchen is with the drawers! My larger pots and pans are stored in a 33 inch base cabinet, along with small appliances and the smaller pots and pans are stored in a 24 inch base cabinet next to the range. I so wish those 2 cabinets were drawer bases!

More drawers, no doubt! I remodeled my kitchen 2 years ago, and without changing the footprint much, I added tons of storage space by making more efficient use of the space I had - including drawers instead of base cabinets.

I don't have a lot of drawers (it's not a big kitchen), but they are fantastic. Here's what I have in mine:

right of range, 34" wide, 3 drawers: top is split in two
top left: potholders/trivets
top right: junk drawer
middle: plastic containers (my favorite!)
bottom: cake pans on their sides (dividers in between, to keep them in place), and mixing bowls

left of range, 24" wide, 3 drawers:
top: cooking utensils
middle: pots and pans
bottom: canisters of sugar, flour, rice, pasta, etc

Left of sink, 18", 4 drawers:
top: small utensils, measuring spoons, etc
#2: bags and wraps
#3: towels and dish cloths
#4: a plastic tub for potatoes and onions; rolling pin and egg beater

I have a flatware drawer over the trash pullout, and a knife insert (another favorite thing) in an angled corner cabinet, with a super susan below.

For the pots and pans drawer, people seem to prefer a vertical pan storage, so you need to make sure that your interior height will fit in the pans so you plan to store there on their side.

When I was researching this, people preferred the three drawer stacks over the four drawer stacks for versatility, since usually all the top drawers are shallow drawers already.

Trash pullout with electric opener is the bomb!!

Javiwa, Thank you. I took another look at the article, 'Everything I Wanted To Know About Drawers' and I started reading the 'Storage...What To Store Where'.

Fishymom and dcward89, Thank you. Your real life experiences with these drawers is very helpful and confirms my belief that the drawers are more useful than the cabinets.

I have a lot of spices; over 80 different types that I currently store alphabetically in rubber dish pans. Not the best solution, but it is the one that has worked best so far. I hadn't considered putting spices in some of the smaller drawers, but that is a great idea!

I also have a lot of heavy cast iron cookware; currently 4 different sized skillets and 3 Dutch ovens. I am wondering if these drawers can handle the weight of the cast iron? I assume I will need to store them in a couple of drawers due to the weight.

Good drawer hardware can handle a lot of weight. I think up to 200# but that includes the weight of the drawer itself. I wonder if you might want a 4-5 drawer stack where you will keep the cast iron so each one could have their own drawer? Or if you go with a wide drawer unit, you could fit several in there side-by-side instead of stacking them. Dunno, but it seems like it would be easier to retrieve them that way. You would need to get the interior measurements of the drawers in a 4 and 5 drawer stack and compare them to the height of your cast iron pans to see what will work. Of course, you'll need deeper for the dutch ovens.

I just removed 48" of uppers and replaced them with a 24" drawer unit. EVERYTHING from those uppers fit in the drawers with room to spare, and things are easier to find and retrieve. Love lower drawers!

annkh_nd, The plan I got originally had one 4 drawer unit, my first thought was "I'll never use all those small drawers!". I was originally thinking of only having 2 and 3 drawer units. But, you have pointed out very good reasons why at least one 4 drawer unit would be useful.

Scrappy45, I do like the vertical pan storage solutions, but I'm worried that they may not work for my cast iron cookware, which is what I have most of, I'm slowly doing away with all the rest except for stock pots. I would like some vertical though for baking pans. A trash pull out is a definite!

I definatly need to do some more thinking and reading! Thanks everyone.

Drawers definitely! Weight capacity depends on several things: the hardware capacity, and the shape or width of the drawer, and what the drawer bottom is made of and how it is constructed. Many like very wide drawers but give little consideration to the drawer width capacity of the hardware, especially given that those drawers will be loaded with heavy dishes or pots and pans.

Drawers of varying depth are the most useful base cabinetry. I also wish I did all drawers.

The only regular base cabinet I have is a pita.

Corie - I spent last night weighing every dutch oven, skillet and lid, trying to figure out how to distribute the loads -- see a2gemini's post about her drawer failure, possible hardware and cabinet box material issues, etc.

I may actually end up with a single base cabinet (12"d x 30h x 24 w) in the left corner of my island, and am thinking about DIYing one of these for my regular-use skillets and saucepans:

This space is located immediately to the left of my cooktop. so placement would be so handy for these items.

I have 2 four drawer bases...one has silverware in the top, dish cloths and towels, unusual utensils I use but not as often (citrus squeezer, zester, pastry blender, etc.), and the bottom drawer is shallow casserole dishes. The other is in my baking "area" and it holds pie/cake pans, measuring cups/spoons, rolling pin, tart pan, bundt pan, springform pan...just everything I use in most of my baking. I definitely think the 4 drawer bases are useful just as much as the 3 drawers.

Every lower I have, except for the corner, is drawers. Even the under sink / trash pullouts can technically be classified as drawers. It's WONDERFUL.

all drawers but don't forget dividers. Either front to back or side to side but dividers are what make a drawer cabinet so far superior. You can do skinny dividers (within a 4 drawer stack) yourself from TJMarshall's by getting ready-made bamboo dividers, reasonably priced. Vertical dividers in a drawer will change your life.

And yes 4 stack drawers are a more efficient use of space for most small kitchen stuff. Love my 4 stacks.

Remember that not all your drawers in a single cabinet need to be the same height: 6-6-8-10, 6-8-8-8, 6-8-16, etc....all equaling 30".

I just finished my kitchen. I'm waiting for the painters to finish before I post my reveal. I went all drawers, thanks to the good folks at GW. I have a lot of little gadgets, knives, baking tools, etc. I thought I needed a 4-drawer stack. My KD steered me away from them. Rather, I have all 3-drawer stacks. One of the stacks has two shallow drawers and one very deep drawer. I purchased a series of bain marie and built an insert for the drawer to contain a lot of my cooking utensils, I also installed a bunch of Rev-a-Shelf inserts. I can't believe how much I loaded into this one drawer stack. You can see from the picture that the bottom drawer is very deep. So, you can vary the size of the drawers.

I also made sure to put in a Super Susan. It holds huge amounts of casserole and mixing bowls.

My formerly cramped kitchen has empty drawers and cabinets because the base drawers are so efficient in handling equipment storage. Other than trash pull out, sink base, a spice pull out and the Super Susan, everything else is a drawer cabinet.

You were asking about spice storage. I'm short. I have trouble seeing things in the back of upper cabinets. It has been my experience that the spice pull out base cabinet is useless, too. I can't see the names of the bottles in a base pull out without squatting down. That takes too much time. Here is my solution. I purchased drop down bins made by Rubbermaid, $11 each, from Target online.

You might consider this solution. Yes, they are displayed in alphabetical order. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist.

Homechef, what a tease!! I can't wait to see your kitchen!