Premiere Blind Corner System (Three of Five)
26 March 2008
I am, as I said, as tired as I can be of digging around in blind corners. Well, actually, I don’t, but that’s only because the stuff I store there is stuff that should probably hit the ash can. Certainly, it has not seen the light of day for fifteen years! But if I could get to that corner easily, what things might I store there! It’s a fantasy almost all of us have, which is why manufacturers and cabinetmakers have worked so hard for a solution over the last few decades.
Which brings us to the current system. This is the top of the line Rev-A-Shelf wire rack system and it is a system I really like. It is made of heavy duty chrome and comes with two large chrome baskets and two small chrome baskets. These shelves are rated for 150 pounds, so even those canned goods are going to do well in this configuration.
Working the unit itself is pretty painless. A quick pull of the handle and the unit glides out of the
cabinet on quiet, ball-bearing slides. One more pull exposes the entire unit. When you’re done, you simply slide the corner unit back into its hiding place.
They have billed this as a unit that turns a wasted corner cabinet into a valuable storage space, and just looking at, and the ease of its operation, it seem perfect for maximizing use and convenience of those blind corner cabinets.
Really, when you think about it, this unit works every way but the right way. The one problem is the math. The two shelves combined give us 444 square inches of storage. But, as we pointed out in our blind corner diagram yesterday, there is typically 506 square inches of storage available in each 24″x24″ square. So what that means, really, is that this nice shiny “perfect” solution to the problem actually does not have as much storage as we would have if we simply boarded up that blind corner and utilized the easily-accessible legs!
Maybe we should give up on any kind of shelves and see what we can do with drawers.
Joseph
What Joseph didn’t mention here is that there are also other companies with similar, but in my opinion better solutions. Peter Meier, Inc. (PMI) has a product they call a Pull-Slide-Pull (PSP) Unit for blind corner cabinets. You pull the baskets out, slide to the side, and pull out the rear baskets to gain complete access to blind corners. The chrome baskets have finished wood bottoms and the unit features self-closing and soft-closing slides. What I especially like about this unit is that everything is moved completely out of the cabinet.
Hafele, another German manufacturer of cabinet hardware has yet another approach to this problem. Take a look at the video, the music is, uh, the best.
Hafele calls this unit their “Magic Corner”. It also features soft closing. I’ve used the Hafele products for a number of jobs and they make nice high quality innovative hardware. Joe
Joe is correct. These are wonderful variations of the idea I’ve discussed above. They’re nice, they’re stainless steel, they have wood bottoms, maybe one day they will play “Happy Days Are Here Again,” as they roll out. But these concepts, like the one I discussed above, all have the same defect. The math defeats them.
Basically, the blind corner cabinet produces two units, each of which is 506 square inches. The one you see when you open the door is readily available; the one you reach around the corner for is not. Combined, there is 1012 square inches of storage. If we are to have a better solution then simply eliminating the blind corner by boarding it up—and if we are to justify the expense of these solutions—we should end up with at least 75% of the available space, or 753 square inches. But in actual fact, these systems, like the one I reviewed, produce LESS than the 506 square inches we would have if we simply boarded up the blind corner and hung a door. The reason for this is simple. It’s because they have to make the shelves considerably smaller in order to maneuver them around the corner.
As for getting the shelves completely out of the cabinet, doesn’t a drawer do that just fine? And, I’m sure, at a much lower price. So, maybe we should be looking at drawers.
Joseph
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4 Responses to “Premiere Blind Corner System (Three of Five)”
July 21st, 2009 at 11:00 AM
Your math is right, but only partially. You are comparing the pictured unit to a full size cabinet… the cabinet shown only offers 20″ x 34″ of storage, or 680 sq.in. The shelf system offers 444 sq.in. or 65% of the FULL unit. If you were to “close off” the corner, you would have approx. 340 sq. in available (note the door is 16″ and the cabinet is 20″ deep, not 24×24 as you stated). So the shelf unit the provides 444 v. 340 or 30% MORE space than a closed off cabinet. Adding drawers is interesting, how much smaller are the drawers compared to just shelves and how much area is lost due to drawers slides, sides, etc.
If you are going to use math, at least compare appels to appels, the 24×24 comparison is NOT valid against the unit pictured.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:56 PM
The figures for the shelf system shown are MINIMUM figures for the installation. That is, you need a cabinet that is at least that big. You can, of course, install it into a large cabinet, but not a smaller one. It is also, to my knowledge, the only size available for the Rev-A-Shelf. The reason is that you need space to allow the mechanism to move around. Fit it too tightly, and you won’t be able to get it out of the cabinet.
Which brings us back to the size I started with, as this would be a typical configuration for a blind corner.
I didn’t get into this part of things, but this particular unit only has two shelves, which means that there is quite a bit of wasted space. Which is true of almost all shelves. There is a fair amount of dead space above whatever you put on the shelf. About the only time you succeed in filling the entire shelf is when you’re storing towels. Almost any drawer can be filled to the brim, especially if it is not too deep.
The typical drawer bank for a kitchen–and especially in the configuration I continued to push with these articles–is a four-drawer bank. So, you would now be able to store considerably more in that space.
My partner argued with a lot of the blogs I wrote on this subject, but when he did his own kitchen, he installed drawer banks on either side of the blind corner. Even though he’s a cabinetmaker and could have done anything he wished, he knew that the most usable solution for base cabinets is to simply install a drawer bank on either leg of the blind corner.
There are a number of solutions for the blind corner for wall cabinets that work well, and I will use one of these when I finally remodel our kitchen. But I will simply use a drawer bank for the blind corner we have. And I say that even though it is a very small kitchen, and we would like every bit of storage space we can get. The math simply does not justify the expense of the various “solutions” for blind corners on base cabinets.
But I do thank you for your comments. I enjoyed the challenge of going back over my figures another time.
Joseph
July 24th, 2009 at 5:00 PM
Well, Joseph, although I didn’t use this type of unit in my own kitchen, they do add the “wow” factor in a kitchen. I did a kitchen recently with a Hafele Magic Corner II unit on one corner and a Hafele Le Mans corner pullout on the other. The clients love them, and it’s one of the first features that they show visitors when they look at their new kitchen. I gotta admit, they are slick.
If I were remodeling my own kitchen again I think I would add them just to sell more kitchens!
Joe
July 24th, 2009 at 5:38 PM
I do think a kitchen should have some “wow” factor. That’s part of the reason you remodel it. In our case we are very tired of a wretched kitchen. But, really now, just about anything we put in that kitchen is going to be an improvement. But… we want to do more than that. We all do. That’s why kitchens end up costing so much.
One of the things I will do for our kitchen is cover all of the shelves with Formica–which is thicker and nicer and much more durable than anything that would be done in Melamine. Then, to finish them off, I will face them with wood that matches the cabinets. That’s some “wow.” How much will it cost? I haven’t done it yet, so I don’t know. But let us suppose, just to make this equal, that the extra cost for that–even for those who would commission the work–comes to exactly what it would cost for the Hafele Le Mans corner pullout you mentioned.
I saw that pullout when you were working on that particular kitchen, and you are absolutely right in saying that it is one slick piece of equipment. But it really doesn’t store any more than would be stored with my much-maligned drawer bank idea. As a matter of fact, it stores less. Yes, it is slick. No, it does not make a positive addition to the kitchen.
Instead, I would advocate–for us, at least–the shelf configuration I have outlined above. It does two things: adds some “wow” and does a better job than regular shelves, because they will be much easier to keep clean.
That happens to be our hot button, but others commissioning a kitchen will surely have things they prefer. Maybe it’s a second sink for food preparation. Or drawers instead of shelves in the base cabinets, thereby making it easier to get to pots and pans.
We all have budgets, excepting only those who have so much money that they can afford a kitchen so big and so glorious that it has no blind corners. But for most of us, a kitchen involves a fair amount of picking and choosing because we simply cannot afford everything we would want for it. That being the way of it, I strongly feel people should simply “do the math,” as I did, on base cabinets. If they do, I think they will pass up the various “blind corner solutions” and spend the money thus saved on something a bit more useful.