Kitchen Cabinet Accessories: How Do You Know What Rev-a-Shelf Items Fit in What Cabinets?

How to choose Rev-A-Shelf cabinet accessories

Since RTA cabinets do not as many bells and whistles as custom cabinets would have, we partnered with Rev-A-Shelf several years ago to start offering their kitchen cabinet accessories for our cabinets.  We don’t manufacture the Rev-A-Shelf line, but we do sell a lot of it.   The biggest question we get is “will this fit in this cabinet?”.  While we have a wide range of their products on our website, not all of them are going to fit in our cabinet lines.   So how do you tell what will fit and what won’t?   Here are some simple guides to help you figure out what will fit.

While I wish it was as simple as saying anything from their accessory line will fit, it simply won’t.   What really is going to affect the accessories that will fit into a cabinet line will be the frame and the overlay of the door.   All of our cabinet lines are framed cabinets, which means the face frame overlaps the sides of the cabinets to make the cabinet more rigid and ultimately more sturdy.   So when you are looking at what will fit into that cabinet, you have to account for the width of the face frame.   All of our cabinets will have 1.5” face frame on each side, so a good rule of thumb is to take the size of the cabinet… say a Base 18… and subtract 3”.  That will be the maximum width that you could fit into the cabinet… so for this example, the maximum width that would fit into the Base 18 would be 15”.  Simple enough, right?

Opening Widths for a Base 18 Kitchen Cabinet

The exception to this rule is for cabinets with ½ overlay or ¾ overlay.   The reason for the exception is that the cabinets use a different type of hinge for the door, which takes up more space.   For our cabinet lines, this really only applies to the Ginger  Maple and Sunset Maple, but for other cabinet companies to could apply to more.   For each door on the cabinet, you will lose another  1” of space.   So a Base 18 in Ginger Maple or Sunset Maple will actually only have 14” of maximum opening space.

Where it really gets complicated is on the double door cabinets.    For a full overlay door, the two doors butt up against each other in the center, so there is no center stile.   For a ½ overlay or ¾ overlay cabinet, the doors will not meet in center so they will traditionally have a center stile (the reason for this is that they try to maintain the same amount of reveal all the way around the doors).     That center stile will act like a double stile for the cabinet.   So a Base 36 in Sunset, will lose 6” of space for the frame of the cabinet and the center stile, then 1” for each door…. So in reality, the openings will only be 14” wide on each side  (the same as the Base 18).  Does that make sense so far?   For a full overlay door, since there won’t be a stile in the middle, you would actually have 33” for the opening.

base 36 kitchen cabinet
specifications for a base 36 kitchen cabinet

These same rules will apply to wall cabinets as well

Pantries

Pantries are a different topic, and this is where a lot of the confusion comes in.   Here is the drawing that comes with the Rev-A-Shelf catalog:

Rev-a-Shelf Swing Out Pantry Unit
specifications for the pantry swing out unit

One thought on “Kitchen Cabinet Accessories: How Do You Know What Rev-a-Shelf Items Fit in What Cabinets?

  1. Larry-
    Did you find a style that you like? Do you need help with figuring out what you will need?

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