I agree with fori, as far as you should take a few items out of your fridge and bring them to the store to play with. Many CD fridges in the Frigidaire/Electrolux line have shelves that are regular depth. They get away with this by rearranging the door bins. How this will affect you depends on how you use your fridge. Some CD fridges are taller so they retain cubic feet. Again, whether this extra height will be helpful depends on how you use your fridge. IMO, most people aren't going to miss the reduced cubic feet that often goes with CD fridges, simply because the back of the fridge is usually where things get lost anyway. :-) I've had people tell me they like a reduced depth fridge because it helps them remember to use the leftovers. Of course, all these things are very personal to your own habits and family size. Bringing your tupperware to the store may feel funny but it is an excellent way to discover your needs. Good luck, and have fun! Lily (who works at Sears)

I agree that the counter should run up to the range on both sides for landing & work space. But that means you will have to build a platform of some sort to support the counter or, at the very least, have some type of support next to the range. Underneath, I'd put in open shelving (as was mentioned previously) for your pots & pans. If a curtain fits the style of your kitchen, you could put up curtains to hide the shelves and protect the contents from dust & debris. You might be able to even install pullout shelves to make access to everything much easier...just attach the pullout shelves to the sides of the support structure you build. How much room is there, btw? What is the style of the doors? If slab, it might be easy to "fill in the blanks" with cabinets or doors from elsewhere.

We have a 13" wide inset drawer cabinet (entire cabinet is 13" wide, not just the drawer) next to our range. It's a 4 drawer stack. I find it useful for pot holders, my collection of most-used recipes in a notecard-size notebook and on loose papers, graters, AL foil,graters, and the bottom deeper drawer holds extra spices and kitchen gadgets I don't use often but want handy (and are too big for our shallow gadget drawer. I find the shallowness of the inset drawer combined with the narrowness problematic. I'd like to keep 4 glove-style oven mitts in one of the drawers, but it's not quite deep enough for them as a stack and not wide enough for them to go side by side with 2 stacks. So I ended up putting 2-3 mitts in one stack and AL next to them to take full advantage of the space. If I had it to do over again, I might go for a 3 drawer stack instead. The narrow drawers would be a bit more useful if they were deeper. But on further thought, the shallowness is only mildly irritating and it's worked pretty well for the last 6 years. hmmm, not sure if I really would give up the extra drawer. Good thing I don't have to make that decision again any time soon! Others above have a good suggestion of putting a cabinet in the lower section for storage of cooling racks, cookie sheets, cutting boards and pizza rounds. I have several cabinets in our kitchen with 2 drawers on top (one below the other) and a cabinet on the bottom. I like this division of cabinet space. fwiw, I love lid storage in drawers and I have quite a few small drawers in the kitchen for this purpose. It sounds a bit extravagant, but lid storage was a major difficulty for me in our old kitchen. I use mason jars all of the time for storage and I love having the lids easily accessible without being stored on the jar (in case the jar wasn't quite dry when put away). We also use a large selection of pyrex dishes and lunch box containers and having nice, organized lids has been a delight. But those drawers are in more out of the way spots (wouldn't be good next to a range.)

I have an L and worried about that before I built my cabinets. Now I find it just gives me freedom to move around. I also have a dining area on the other side of the L. I guess it would depend upon how big your kitchen is, as to how much space is wasted. If it's big enough, perhaps a rolling island? But that's clutter to me, when if it's big enough a U would work. You got lazy susans? C.