How to Organize Corner Kitchen Cabinets

One of the trickiest aspects of moving into a new home is troubleshooting unique storage situations, especially in the kitchen! Every single time, there is some new-to-us setup that we have to figure out. Our current kitchen is full of conundrums, and I’ve already solved a few for our storage spaces: storing food without a pantry, maximizing deep drawers, a massive junk drawer, and the cabinet above the refrigerator. Today, I’m tackling another tricky spot: our kitchen corner cabinets. I’ll show you how we’re organizing our cabinets, and explain how you can apply the same concepts to your own kitchen, no matter the cabinet designs you’re working with!

The Corner Cabinets In My Kitchen

Corner kitchen cabinets exist in many kitchens with L- or U-shaped layouts. Instead of using standard, square cabinets that create empty or hard-to-reach cavities, 90-degree cabinets are installed in order to utilize every inch of your cabinet space.

Typically, corner cabinets feature an L-shaped design with shelves that sit into the corner. Sometimes, they will have a turntable instead of shelves, which really increases both the usable space while providing easy reach for frequently used items.

Our corner kitchen cabinets have both the L-shaped shelves (upper) and the turntable (lower). As I show you exactly how we organized the cabinet’s contents in both corner cabinets, there is a consistent theme you’ll notice: round shapes. Let me show you what I mean!

How to Organize L-Shaped Corner Cabinets

When you have L-shaped shelves in a corner of a kitchen (or anywhere else, actually!), the best way to maximize the available space is with round items: bowls, cake plates, small appliances, turntables, lazy susans, round baskets, etc.

Round items fit best into a corner storage layout while still remaining easy to get in and out. Additionally, a corner will be deeper than its adjacent shelf, making it the ideal spot for anything that doesn’t fit on standard-depth shelves.

We chose to put all our round items in our upper corner cabinet. But even if you just focus on putting round items in the corner spots, you’ll still be able to use the rest of the shelves for square-shaped items as needed.

Perhaps you don’t have large items to store in your corner cabinets, or instead need them to hold smaller items. By using round and turnable storage containers, such as lazy susans or turntables, you can still take advantage of the corner depth, but in a way that keeps small items corralled and easy to grab.

This is a great option for spices, oils, measuring spoons/cups, vitamins, medicines, and other essentials.

Lazy susan-type containers are now available in a wide variety of  styles, sizes, and finishes. With a bit of research, you can easily find something that fits your cabinet, allowing you to store items and hold precisely what you need. Just make sure you measure your cabinet so you get something that will allow your cabinet door to close comfortably!

Finally, when considering what to store in your L-shaped corner cabinets, don’t forget to configure the shelf height to accommodate your specific items (if possible), and place items based on how often you use them.

Our bottom two shelves were positioned to fit all of our mixing bowls, while leaving ample room along the top for taller items. Similarly, our most frequently-used items are lower down, while less-used appliances are higher up.

How to Organize Corner Cabinets with Turntables

Many lower corner kitchen cabinets are outfitted with tiered lazy susans for a few reasons.

• First, their round shape takes best advantage of the deep cavity between the lower cabinet doors and the corner/walls.
• Second, the spinning functionality makes it easy to access everything in the cabinet without having to dig through to the back!

Based on our needs, we opted to store our pots and pans on the turntable within our lower kitchen cabinet. But I’d like you to pay attention to how the pots are stored: pot toward the outside, handle toward the inside.

The best way to take advantage of the entire corner on a turntable is with pie-shaped items; and if you look closely, our pot arrangement mimics slices of a pie. With the pots toward the outside and the handles toward the inside, I am able to best fit items around the circumference. This arrangement also keeps handles safe from catching along the sides as it spins (and therefor getting stuck).

Above, I purposely shifted the lower set of pans horizontally so you can see that they waste a lot more space, and the handles can easily catch the cabinet’s side.

If you need to store pantry items or other small essentials in a large corner cabinet outfitted with a turntable, the pie-shaped baskets and containers shown below are your best bet for creating and maintaining order. If we weren’t using our corner cabinet for pots and pans, these are absolutely what I’d use for cereal, canned goods, snacks, spices, medicines, measuring cups/spoons, cookie cutters, and more!

Again, always make sure you measure your specific cabinet to identify products that will fit just right!

Organizing corner kitchen cabinets can be a little tricky. But by picking the right shape of items for this corner space, you can really maximize how they both look and function. Round items work best on L-shaped shelves, while pie-shaped items are ideal for turntables. If you’ve been struggling to find the perfect corner cabinet solution that would create more order in your cabinetry, I hope you give some of these ideas a try!