Ditch The Lazy Susan: There's A Smarter Way To Organize Kitchen & Bathroom Cabinets

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Chances are pretty good that the upper kitchen or bathroom cabinets are underused. If you're not tall, lugging a chair or stepladder over every time you need something is a real pain. Once you've climbed up there, a lazy susan is helpful for accessing items at the back of the cabinet, but it does nothing to solve the climbing issue. Plus, if you have limited mobility, this scenario might be impossible. Pull-down shelves are the answer to your woes. For upper shelves, these storage solutions might replace the lazy susan as a kitchen's best friend. These extendable racks let you grab what you need from above by pulling a handle, essentially bringing the contents of a cabinet down to your level. This happens thanks to jointed arms and movement control mechanisms like gears, hydraulics, and/or coil springs. Once the unit is screwed into the cabinet, it's a safe, smooth way to get better use out of all the space in your highest cabinets.

Take a peek at a high-up cabinet somewhere in your home. If you've crammed the space to the max, you'll need to practically disembowel the cabinet to reach items stored behind everything else, right? Add that to the height problem, and the user-friendliness of this space plummets. Pull-down shelves can be one of the best ways to organize your cabinets; they not only help you reach things, but they also maximize vertical space and allow access to things stored at the back of a cabinet. There are a decent number of companies that sell these contraptions, and there might be one with the dimensions and price tag that works for you.

Prices on pull-down shelves range from around $30 to several hundred dollars, depending on their size and specs. With this baffling price range, it's hard to know what's a fair price for what you get. You'll need a rack that helps you use every inch of cabinet storage space. However, this is only helpful if the rack is of good quality and stores what you've got on it safely. Scanning through product details and customer reviews among Amazon's many offerings, there isn't an obvious advantage to shelling out two or three times the price of a budget-friendly model for something like this costly Rev-A-Shelf Pull-Down Shelf.

Surprisingly enough, there are highly-rated products on the lower price range that fit the bill. Lots of pull-down shelves have low backs that can allow items to tip backward and behind the rack. Instead, look for a product like the HAPPCUCOE Pull-Down Shelf Organizer that has a tall backing on each shelf. With a price of about $105 and an average rating of 4.5 stars, this unit is hard to beat.

Another consideration is how efficiently the shelf uses your available space. For instance, take this NeNchengLi 2-Tier Pull-Down Shelf, whose $59 price makes it really attractive. It's got a full back to prevent items from falling, and the metal structure appears sturdy, but the design still falls short. With a stair-step design rather than two stacked shelves that pivot downward and outward, you're essentially getting one shelf's worth of storage while still leaving plenty of dead space.