How to Get More Storage From a 1950s Kitchen Without Moving a Wall
Camarillo Custom Cabinets works in a lot of mid-century housing, and the most common brief we get in Midtown Ventura and the Camarillo flats is not 'make this bigger' but 'make this hold more'. Those are different problems, and the second one is far cheaper to solve.
Midtown Ventura's median home was built in 1951, and the Camarillo flats are largely 1950s through 1970s post-war ranch and tract housing. Those kitchens were designed around much smaller household food storage and far fewer appliances than anyone owns now. The good news is that most of them are wasting an enormous amount of their own volume.
Recover the Dead Band Above the Cabinets
Most kitchens of this era stop the wall cabinets at 84 inches and leave either open dead space or a boxed soffit above. In a room with a conventional eight-foot ceiling that is a full extra shelf band running the length of every wall, doing nothing.
Running cabinets to the ceiling recovers it. The space is best used for genuinely seasonal storage since it needs a step stool, but moving holiday dishes and bulk items up there frees prime reachable space below.
Before planning this, find out what is inside the soffit. Some are hollow and come out easily. Others carry ducting, plumbing or wiring that has to be rerouted, which is a different trade and a different budget. We check before quoting rather than discovering it on demolition day.
Convert Lower Doors to Drawers
This is the single highest-value change available in an old kitchen and it changes nothing about the footprint.
A base cabinet with a door and a fixed shelf requires you to crouch, open the door, and reach past everything in front to find what is at the back. In practice the rear third of every base cabinet in a door-fronted kitchen is dead storage. Replacing those doors with a bank of full-extension drawers brings the entire contents out to you.
Where a full drawer conversion is out of budget, roll-out shelves inside the existing cabinet achieve most of the same gain for considerably less, and they can be fitted without replacing the box.
The back third of a door-fronted base cabinet is effectively dead storage.
Deal With the Blind Corner
Almost every L-shaped kitchen of this era has a blind corner base cabinet: the one where the opening is on one wall and the cabinet extends around the corner into darkness. With a fixed shelf it buries close to a cubic yard of space that you have to physically crawl into.
Blind corner pull-out systems swing the entire contents out through the opening. They are not cheap per unit, but measured as cost per cubic foot of storage recovered they are among the best value in the kitchen.
Fix the Depth Problem
Standard wall cabinets are 12 inches deep and standard pantry shelving is often 16 or more. Anything deeper than about 14 inches holds two rows and makes the back row invisible, which is precisely how food expires unopened and why you own three of the same spice.
Shallow adjustable shelving at 10 to 14 inches shows you a single visible row of everything. The capacity you appear to give up comes straight back, because you actually use what you can see. This applies to pantry conversions in particular, and older Ventura and Camarillo homes rarely have a pantry at all, so a hall closet next to the kitchen is often the best candidate.
Small Moves That Add Up
- A toe-kick drawer under a base cabinet, recovering space that is currently nothing but a plinth
- Vertical dividers above the fridge for trays, boards and baking sheets stored on edge
- A shallow door-mounted rack inside the sink base for cleaning supplies
- Under-shelf drawers in wall cabinets to split a tall unused void
- A pull-out bin cabinet, which frees the floor space a freestanding bin occupies
Related reading on our site: custom cabinets in Ventura, pantry and laundry cabinetry, custom cabinetry and our Ventura service area.
Talk It Through With Us
Most small kitchens have far more recoverable storage in them than their owners expect, and finding it costs nothing. Camarillo Custom Cabinets will measure your kitchen and show you where it is hiding before you spend anything. Call (805) 793-0835.