Design Custom Cabinets: Elements
At Old River Cabinets, our team designs custom cabinets for kitchens with regards to modern food preparation, recycling needs, and storage requirements. The functional requirements of a kitchen demands a fresh approach to designing custom kitchen cabinets when maximizing your kitchen's potential, and this is where we shine. We believe a kitchen cabinet's beauty is more than just "skin-deep"; it is beautifully functional due to the efforts of our outstanding design team. Kitchen renovations are our specialty!
Old River Cabinets' designers embrace the latest scientific concepts in kitchen plan management. Based on careful research, your personal designer will work with you to optimally place the five zones each kitchen must contain. These zones must each be carefully considered and balanced to create a productive kitchen that will be a joy to work in and will bring increased value to your home.
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The five-zone concept is simple but enormously powerful. Each kitchen ultimately must accomplish five separate tasks:
- One: Storage of Consumable items such as foods, drinks, condiments, coffee, canned and dry goods, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, paper goods, etc.
- Two: Storage of Non-Consumable items such as dishware, glassware, linens, silverware, storage containers, etc.
- Three: Cleaning and Disposal areas to include sinks and dishwashers, disposals, and storage for cleaning supplies, trashcans, and recycle stations, etc.
- Four: Preparation areas are essential and should include easy access to mixing bowls, blenders, mixers, cutting boards, knife storage, oils, spices, sauce ingredients, etc.
- Five: Cooking zones require easy access to cookware, bakeware, roasting pans, cook's tools, timers, etc.
Efficient layout of these zones takes into consideration the need for items used most often to be readily available to hand. Our designers look for ways to reduce the amount of back-and-forth travel to perform common tasks and utilize ergonomic design to reduce stress on the body and meet the special needs of the entire family. Families with children or disabled members especially will want to carefully plan for total access to all five zones. Specialty drawer and cabinet hardware is also integral to the design process of Old River Cabinets, and we are experienced in integrating the top suppliers in the industry, including Blum or Hettich for example. Our hardware performs smoothly and quietly, with effortless operation and maintenance free design. Silent-system self-closing drawer and cabinet door mechanisms bring an elegance of operation to our expertly designed kitchens.
A beautifully functional kitchen allows for reconfiguration to meet new demands. The Non-Consumable zone of the kitchen, especially, needs to be adjustable for constantly changing needs. The Cleaning zone is one of the most critical design areas because it gets extensive use, day after day. Research shows that most people keep a kitchen for an average of 20 years, and 60% of home-owners realize too late that they did not plan for enough storage space.
What can be a design obstacle for many cabinet builders is a strength for Old River Cabinets: the corner cabinet. Let our designers impress you with solutions to maximize every inch of all of your corners. Also, remember to consider how many people might be simultaneously preparing and cooking in the kitchen. Whether you are baking cookies with your kids or sharing your favorite recipe with a friend, plan for effortless efficiency.
Finally, keep in mind that these principles to design custom cabinets in an efficient way apply equally to bathrooms, offices, media rooms, and closet systems as well.