Yesterday I read a blog about Kitchen design and how important good kitchen design is in terms of the livability of a home. It got me thinking about my own past kitchen designs. For me, the rest of the house was always designed around the kitchen, instead of the kitchen being fitted into the design of the home. Today I just want to talk about one small aspect of the kitchen that came up in this other blog----the "Lazy-Susan"----or more politically correct the "revolving shelf."
It was always one of my pet peeves that commercially available revolving shelves for corner base cabinets were always much smaller than the total square footage of the inside of the cabinet. This is due to the fact that the largest diameter shelf that can be installed in a corner base cabinet is limited by the diagonal dimension of the opening of the cabinet.
Quite early in my cabinet making career I created a way around this problem that resulted in doubling the square footage of the shelf itself and thus covering more of the square footage of the inside of the cabinet. The diameter of the shelf could now be 1" less than the inside width of the cabinet. There is very little wasted space with this design, leaving plenty of room for all the things you want to keep in there from Olive Oil and Wolfgang Puck's "Chicken Noodle Soup"-----to Monster Spray.
The first key is to "diagonal" the front of the cabinet. This eliminates the 90-degree inside corner that is common in kitchens; and, it eliminates those funky folding doors-----or the even worse design where the shelves are attached to the door itself. Since the shelves themselves are larger in diameter than the diagonal measurement of the opening, the shelf has to be modified with a Pac-Man like cut-out. The dimension from this cut-out across the shelf is the slightly less than the diagonal measurement of the door opening to allow for insertion of the shelf----and then the Pac-Man piece is put back in place. In this next picture one can see the cut-out line and what it looks like installed in the cabinet.
I made hundreds of these shelves for the kitchens I built. The short dowels keep things from spinning off the shelves and allow for easy turning of the shelf. Also the shelf height is adjustable. My kids use to put each other on the shelves and spin each other around when they were little.
Perhaps one day---the "Pac-Man-Shelf" will be readily available from cabinet suppliers.
Charles Buell
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PS, for those of you that are new to my blog (or for some other "unexplained" reason have never noticed)
all pictures and smiley-face inserts (emoticons) (when I use them) have messages that show up when you point at them with your cursor.
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