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Kitchen cabinet garage


13 Appliance Garage Ideas for a Clutter-Free Kitchen

Photo: Dale Lang; ROM Architecture Studio

It’s all too easy to let small kitchen appliances take over your counter space. Even if you frequently use your air fryer or coffee maker, they can still make kitchen counters look cluttered and reduce your available space for food prep and other cooking-related tasks.

Luckily, an appliance garage can help solve this problem. Much like a regular garage keeps your car protected and out of sight, appliance garages offer similar benefits for your kitchen. They work to declutter kitchen countertops by providing a convenient place to store small appliances.

There are several different design options to pick from, including freestanding appliance garages, ones that are built into cabinets, and corner pieces that can be added to an existing kitchen layout. Find inspiration for your own kitchen appliance garage below.

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RELATED: These Cabinet Customizations are Totally Worth It, According to Pro Organizers

1. Lifting Door

Photo: thomasvillecabinetry.com

A lifting appliance garage door allows for easy access to frequently-used kitchen appliances. This style also keeps the door out of the way, allowing you to simply slide the appliance forward for use. Then, once you’re done using it, just push it back into its place and pull the door down to keep your counters clear and clutter-free.

2. Spacious Shelves

Photo: John Granen; Interiors by Popov

The size of an appliance garage cabinet can be customized to match your specific storage needs. If you have multiple small appliances—such as a coffee maker, toaster, and blender—that you want to keep hidden, consider a multitiered cabinet.

A carefully designed cabinet with shelves can provide sufficient space to keep all of your essentials where you can easily reach them. It can also provide space to store additional items, such as mugs for a hideaway coffee bar.

3. Corner Appliance Garage

Photo: rockler.com

If you’re buying new cabinets, consider making the most of corner space with this Rockler appliance garage kit. The kit features a tambour roll-up door that stays out of the way to let you move your appliances in and out of the space with ease. After you’re finished working, quickly clean up the counter by placing the appliance back in the garage and closing the door.

4. Under-Cabinet Hideaway

Photo: matticedesign.com

Small appliances stored along the back of the counter can make a kitchen look messy. Adding a countertop appliance garage beneath a set of cabinets allows you to take advantage of this convenient storage space while also ensuring that your small appliances don’t take away from the clean and put-together look of your kitchen when they’re not in use.

5. Accessible Appliances

Photo: Kathryn Barnard; ROM Architecture Studio

An appliance garage can also help you create an accessible kitchen station for homes with one or more household members who use a wheelchair or prefer to sit while they work. This appliance garage opens to reveal a baking station that sits at just the right height for use in a seated position. When the door is opened, the countertop drawer pulls out to create a comfortable workspace.

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6. Hidden Mixer

Photo: kraftmaid.com

Stand mixers are indispensable for baking, but they are bulky, heavy, and take up a lot of countertop space. Their larger size also makes it difficult to store them in a lower cabinet. With an appliance cabinet, you can keep a stand mixer on the counter where it will be ready when you need it, but also out of sight when it’s not in use.

RELATED: The Best Kitchen Cabinets of 2022

7. Room for Two

Photo: barbrabrightdesign.com

One of the benefits of appliance garages is that they can be customized to match your specific storage needs. Consider the layout of your kitchen and how many small appliances you’d like to conceal. Then decide on the ideal dimensions for your appliance garage. While this example is wide enough to comfortably fit a toaster and coffee maker, your kitchen’s appliance garage can be whatever size your cooking needs call for.

8. Triple Decker Garage

Photo: Flavin Architects; Kitchen Vendor: Jay Hollis and Associates; General Contractor: Brian Perkins, Perkins Custom Contracting, LLC; Photographer: Nat Rea (natrea.com)

Why settle for just one appliance garage when you can have three? A multilevel garage offers additional space to store your must-have appliances and other essentials that you’d prefer to have on hand. If you integrate the design of your garage into a corner, you could even integrate dual-access doors to make grabbing the specific tool you need easier.

9. Compact Appliance Garage

Photo: www.richelieu.com

Even if you have a smaller kitchen and don’t have extra countertop or cabinet space to give up, you’ll find that there are several appliance garage ideas that could work. One idea is to mount a more compact garage beneath one of the cabinets without taking away from the counter space beneath it. This more compact appliance garage won’t fit larger appliances, like an air fryer or stand mixer. However, it could help keep other items—such as smaller appliances, sugar bowls, or coffee canisters—from cluttering your countertops.

10. Bifold Door

Photo: Michael Alan Kaskel; Lifestyle Design

Another idea is to integrate a countertop storage cabinet into your design when you’re buying new kitchen cabinets. With a folding door, the door can open fully to leave you plenty of counter space to work and use a toaster, coffee maker, or other small appliances. Once closed back up, the sliding door can look nearly identical to the cabinet doors above it for a cohesive look.

11. Double-Door Garage

Photo: Teri Fotheringham; JJ Interiors

A kitchen appliance cabinet offers sufficient space to hold a large toaster and coffee maker. The double doors open and slide back into the cabinet to provide ample space for cooking or preparing food. With the garage’s location at the back of the counter under the cabinets, it provides an integrated look with the rest of the cabinetry.

12. Sizeable Storage

Photo: STUDIOBUELL / Garett Buell ; noblearchitects.com

If you’re installing your own kitchen cabinets, look for some appliance garage hardware that will convert one of the doors to open and tuck away beneath the cabinet above it. This will provide you with easy access to your most used appliances—such as a blender, food processor, or slow cooker. When closed, this door design can blend in seamlessly with the rest of the cabinetry in your kitchen to keep your small appliances hidden.

13. Hidden Shelves

Photo: Moris Moreno; ROM Architecture Studio

A modern appliance garage coordinates nicely with a modern kitchen. In this example, the appliance garage offers three shelves, with the bottom shelf offering space to accommodate a coffee and cappuccino maker. When you’re ready to make your morning cup of coffee, simply open the doors, slide them back out of the way, and you have a ready-to-go coffee station. With the additional shelves, you can store mugs, coffee tins, tea bags, sugar, and other necessities.

RELATED: The Best Kitchen Appliance Brands

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Kitchen Appliance Garage DIY - Angela Marie Made

Learn how to build a kitchen appliance garage cabinet and how to hide a microwave or other countertop clutter!

I knew I had to include a kitchen appliance garage DIY to hide our microwave, small appliances, and some other countertop clutter while planning our DIY built in cabinets for the kitchen.

I first discovered appliance garage cabinets on Pinterest and I’ve wanted one ever since! Although they are a very custom feature in a kitchen, it doesn’t mean you can’t have one. I’m going to show you step by step how to build and install one!

But first let’s talk about what an appliance garage actually is and the different types of hinges for it.

What is an appliance garage?

If you’ve never heard of an appliance garage, it’s a type of kitchen cabinet, where the door opens up and down like an actual garage door or pull down-door. Although there are some styles that have two cabinet doors that open from the side and go back like tuck-in doors.

Have you ever wondered, how can I hide my appliances on my counter? An appliance garage is a great solution for hiding small appliances because it’s wide open and a great size to store countertop appliances.

An appliance garage cabinet typically sits on top of a counter or it can be installed on the wall, as part of upper cabinets, or in a corner space as part of a corner cabinet. So, it’s easily accessible for everyday items or small appliances that you need to grab quickly but don’t want to be out in the open causing clutter.

It’s also a great way for how to hide a microwave, Instant Pot, stand mixer, coffee maker, food processor, and any other small kitchen appliances that may not be pretty to look at but need easy access daily for many kitchens!

Appliance garages are great for providing kitchen organization in both small kitchens and large kitchens.

Note, this post contains some affiliate links. For more info see my disclosures here.

Appliance Garage Hinges

The key to creating an appliance garage cabinet is having the right hinges. There are a few different hinges available on the market.

I think it’s important to really have a quality hinge that functions well for a DIY appliance garage that you will likely be using multiple times a day if it’s hiding a microwave or other often used items.

For that reason, I bought the most affordable, high quality hinge that I could find. The hinge I bought is from the Blum AVENTOS HL lift systems. Blum is known for having high quality hinges.

This Blum hinge can be used on cabinets with a cabinet height range of 11-13/16″ to 22-13/16″ tall and a cabinet width range up to 72″ wide.

The installation instructions for the lift system hinges provided by Blum explain exactly which parts you need. Here are the Blum parts we ordered for our DIY appliance garage:

Not all of the parts were available/in stock from the same place, so I had to order from two other online stores including Build with Ferguson and Cabinet Parts.

The total cost of hinge parts plus shipping that I paid was less than $250.

Other appliance garage hinge options

In case you are curious, here are a few other appliance garage hinge options I found in my research that operate in an up and down lift motion.

On the lower cost end, there was this budget friendly hinge. The reviews are mixed though and it didn’t look like it functioned as smoothly as the Blum hinge.

A higher cost option is this hinge that I discovered from this appliance garage by Chris Loves Julia that’s very awesome. It’s very expensive though, but looks very high quality and high end!

How to Build a Kitchen Appliance Garage DIY

Materials

Tools

DIY Appliance Garage Video Tutorial:

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Get all of the appliance garage details and see the installation in action in the DIY appliance garage VIDEO here!

1.

Build (or buy) a cabinet and door and install the cabinet on the wall

The very first step of a kitchen appliance garage DIY is to build (or buy) a cabinet and door and install the cabinet on the wall.

I have a step by step tutorial for how we built our appliance garage cabinet as part of our countertop cabinet (which sits on top of our butcher block countertop) in my DIY built in cabinets tutorial.

I did order the custom size door premade online for the appliance garage door, but you can also build a door like we did for our DIY wall cabinet and door.

Ready to go cabinet and door options for an appliance garage DIY

Another option is to buy a premade cabinet and door, also known as a stock cabinet. Something like these shaker cabinets which come in different heights and widths. Although, they would need a one panel door to be built or ordered.

Other ready to go kitchen cabinets that would work are IKEA cabinets or a combination of IKEA Sektion cabinetry, which has both the cabinet and matching door ready to go. Perfect for an IKEA hack!

Electrical Outlet Access

An important feature of an appliance garage is the ability to hide appliances which need access to power or a wall outlet. So make sure you have one if you want this feature!

We had a wall outlet in the corner on the wall where we were installing our cabinets. But, we did actually end up having to move it because the hinges needed to be installed where our outlet was located. You can see more details on how we did this in our built in cabinets tutorial for our kitchen!

2. Make the appliance garage cabinet frameless if needed

If your cabinet has a face frame like ours, then it needs to be made “frameless”. If your cabinet is a frameless style cabinet already, you can skip this step!

We’ve had to do this before for cabinet hinges, including the door installation for our built in cabinet for our entryway and our DIY wall cabinet and door.

You can see this in action in the appliance garage video, but you just need to install a piece of 3/4″ thick wood to make the face frame and inside of the cabinet flush with each other.

This piece of wood is where the appliance garage hinges will be installed, so make sure to place it in the top left and right corners inside of the cabinet. And make sure the screws are countersunk or the screw heads are out of the way of where the hinge will be installed.

Also, make sure the piece of wood is at least 7″ tall x 11″ long.

3. Mark and drill the pin hole locations for the hinges

Steps 3 – 9 are in accordance with the Blum hinge directions but I have broken them out and explained them in more detail along with photos and a video tutorial too!

First, mark and drill the pin hole locations for the hinges on the inside of the cabinet so the hinge is installed in the correct position.

We marked ours according to the directions that we converted from millimeters to inches using Google metric converter.

We used our combination square to help with this step.

Use a 3/16″ drill bit to drill the holes about an 1/8″ deep. Note, the symbol Ø5 in the directions stands for a 3/16″ drill bit.

4. Attach the hinges to the appliance garage cabinet

Align the two pins on the hinges with the drilled holes. Then, screw the hinge in place in the cabinet with the included screws.

The front edge of the hinge will be aligned with the top corner edge of the cabinet once installed.

And on the other side:

5. Attach the arm assembly

Once the hinges are installed on both sides, the arm assemblies can be attached. They just snap in place when you push them up and in towards the hinge. See how this works in the appliance garage video!

According to the directions, once the arms are installed you don’t want to push down on them to avoid injury.

6. Attach the stabilizer rod

The next step is to attach the stabilizer rod but first it needs to be cut to size according to the directions which state it should be the interior cabinet opening minus 5 1/16″.

Brandon used our Dremel saw fit with a special blade that can cut metal and aluminum to cut the rod.

Then he put it in place on the arms and covered the ends with the cover caps.

7. Attach the mounting plates

To attach the door, mounting plates need to be installed on it first.

Again we followed the instructions template for the arm model we have to determine where to mount the plates on each side of the back of our door.

We just used some ¾” screws we had on hand for this step because there were no screws that came with the plates.

8. Attach the cabinet door to the kitchen appliance garage DIY

Finally, the door can be attached by clipping the plates onto the arm assemblies.

Our door lined up really well at first, but we did have to adjust it some.

One of the nice features of these hinges is that they are adjustable! You can adjust the door left/right, up/down, and in/out. You can also adjust the tension for opening/closing it!

Note about the arm assembly and cabinet door

After installing the door, the first thing we noticed was that our door didn’t go all the way up above the cabinet, it sat a few inches below the top of it.

This is annoying because it makes it harder to access everything.

I did buy the right arm assembly model according to the directions, but our cabinet height is right below the max height of 15 ¾” for this arm assembly model.

So, I decided to buy the next size up to replace it. I replaced part # BA20L3500.06 with part # BA20L3800.06.

Thankfully, the directions also tell you how to remove everything!

After installing the new longer arm assembly, our appliance garage functions great and the height of the door is just right!

9. Attach the covers over the hinges

The very last step is to attach the cover plates on the hinges, they just snap into place, and provide a clean, finished look.

I totally love our new countertop appliance garage! It’s fun and super easy and smooth to use. You can see how smoothly it opens and closes in the appliance garage video!

It slow closes too and is perfect for daily use. It looks very sharp and pretty when closed:

I love having our microwave and countertop clutter hidden in our appliance garage cabinet. It’s super satisfying.

I tried it out with some other small appliances too!

I think it’s the best way and best kitchen idea ever for hiding the microwave and not having it sit out on our kitchen counters! I may even add our toaster oven in here too to keep hidden!

This kitchen appliance garage DIY completes our DIY built in cabinets for the kitchen. We still have the rest of the kitchen to makeover in the near future, so make sure to follow along so you don’t miss it along with all of our other new house projects!

Follow along on Instagram and YouTube!

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Tire storage cabinets are often placed in the people's garage; they are a closed metal structure with shelves and doors. This decision to equip your parking space with a wardrobe is of great practical importance. After all, even servicing your car in an auto technical center, when routine maintenance is carried out, such as: changing oil and filters, adding brake fluid and antifreeze, lubricating a number of units and locks. All the same, in the interval between them, the car owner also has to carry out minimal maintenance. And for this, he must have several technical fluids on hand, and for safe movement, a replaceable set of rubber. For example, there are a number of models that require a constant addition of engine oil, a constant consumable is windshield washer fluid, etc. And all this needs to be stored somewhere, either in an apartment or in the trunk of a car, in any case, this is of course a way out, but not the best, so it is best to store these things in a garage. But at the moment, GSK is not being built in Moscow, or rather, its improved commercial version of the people's garage is being built. After all, the very concept of the people's garage was created in order to accommodate as many cars as possible in a limited space, thus removing them from the yards and adjacent streets. And since an individual parking space is publicly available, a lockable tire storage cabinet is needed, because tires take up the most space, and the most advanced cabinet models have additional shelves for storing additional items. Although you can additionally buy an archival metal cabinet and drill a series of holes in it, use nuts and bolts to connect it to the base model. This design gives us a number of advantages, first of all, the archival model is cheap, secondly, it is bulky and cannot be stolen, and thirdly, we will get a large additional space with shelves and a lock.

Undoubtedly, what we talked about above will not replace a full-fledged garage for us, but civilization does not stand still and at this stage it is moving towards the highly specialized workers, and if earlier a motorist often repaired and serviced his car himself, now this is all less and less. There is no need for a separate closed building, where there is a workbench and a set of repair tools is stored. More comfortable conditions are created for motorists, services and so on, storage cabinets in the garage fit into the same concept. On the one hand, a complex is created for parking a large number of cars, with small parking spaces, but on the other hand, there is enough space left to put a cabinet for folding tires and rims.

Very often they put metal cabinets for storing tires in the people's garage, they are a closed metal structure with shelves and doors. This decision to equip your parking space with a wardrobe is of great practical importance. After all, even servicing your car in an auto technical center, when routine maintenance is carried out, such as: changing oil and filters, adding brake fluid and antifreeze, lubricating a number of units and locks. All the same, in the interval between them, the car owner also has to carry out minimal maintenance. And for this, he must have several technical fluids on hand, and for safe movement, a replaceable set of rubber. For example, there are a number of models that require a constant addition of engine oil, a constant consumable is windshield washer fluid, etc. And all this needs to be stored somewhere, either in an apartment or in the trunk of a car, in any case, this is of course a way out, but not the best, so it is best to store these things in a garage. But at the moment, GSK is not being built in Moscow, or rather, its improved commercial version of the people's garage is being built. After all, the very concept of the people's garage was created in order to accommodate as many cars as possible in a limited space, thus removing them from the yards and adjacent streets. And since an individual parking space is publicly available, a tire storage cabinet with a lock is needed, because it is the tires that occupy the most space, and the most advanced cabinet models have additional shelves for storing additional items. Although you can additionally buy an archival metal cabinet and drill a series of holes in it, use nuts and bolts to connect it to the base model. This design gives us a number of advantages, first of all, the archival model is cheap, secondly, it is bulky and cannot be stolen, and thirdly, we will get a large additional space with shelves and a lock.

Undoubtedly, what we talked about above will not replace a full-fledged garage for us, but civilization does not stand still and at this stage it is moving towards the highly specialized workers, and if earlier a motorist often repaired and serviced his car himself, now this is all less and less. There is no need for a separate closed building, where there is a workbench and a set of repair tools is stored. More comfortable conditions are created for motorists, services and so on, storage cabinets in the garage fit into the same concept. On the one hand, a complex is created for parking a large number of cars, with small parking spaces, but on the other hand, there is enough space left to put a cabinet for folding tires and rims.

The article was prepared on the basis of the materials of the company www.unonamebel.ru

Equipping a garage: how to choose a tool cabinet and not only

Catalog

Information

A modern garage is like a workshop. Its presence allows the handyman not to try to create a workplace in the house, put up a workbench and a tool cabinet - after all, many types of work are undesirable to be done in a living space, for sanitary and hygienic reasons. Any woman, no matter how much she appreciates the ability of a man to solve all domestic problems on his own, make repairs with his own hands, indulge in his favorite hobby, will object to the typically “male” hobbies associated with soldering, drilling and woodworking. Indeed, in the process it is impossible to control the waste of mini-production flying in all directions and keep the house clean. Therefore, the garage becomes the main “base of operations” for the man.

Garage workspace organization principles
So, in the garage it is worth highlighting several separate functional areas:

Fans of fishing and hunting, seasonal sports will also have to allocate a place in the garage to install a safe, store gear, sports equipment, etc. Since tool cabinets are versatile in design, ready-made budget options will also help in better organization of the storage system. It will be convenient to store all the little things in drawers - fishing hooks, decoys, cartridges, devices for the care of weapons and equipment, and large items in hollow internal sections.

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