Kitchen DIY: Adding Cookie Sheet & Tray Storage Above the Oven

Ever since the first time I saw it, I’ve wanted vertical storage in an upper cabinet for my cookie sheets, cutting boards, serving trays, and other narrow kitchen items. My parents had it in their last house, and I was determined to get shelving like this for myself someday. So when we were house hunting last summer, I made sure to check all the deep upper kitchen cabinets for vertical storage dividers. I don’t think I found a single one. We still managed to find a house we love, despite the lack of this key feature. But I had plans. Big plans. 🙂

Our new house has double ovens, with a deep cabinet above the oven unit that was just screaming for vertical dividers. (My husband didn’t hear it, but I promise, I could hear the cabinet screaming for organizational help.) So I devised a plan to add the dividers myself. I could have bought wire dividers like these from The Container Store, but I wanted them to be a little more substantial and look like built-ins. My project went really well, so I thought I’d share the steps I took here in case anyone else wants to do the same thing in their kitchen.

Here’s what it looked like before my big project… A mess, right? Mostly I had just been sticking things up there that I didn’t really use, since it was such a pain to actually get things down. I know it’s not a great picture — I was in a hurry to pull everything out and get started. LOL

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My idea was to install strips of wood along the bottom and top and leave a space between them to slide dividers in and out of. This way it would be adjustable for smaller and larger pans. Once I had my plan, I went to Lowe’s and bought a few different boards to see what would work along the top and bottom. After getting them home, I decided on 1/4″x2″x24″ poplar boards from the craft wood section of Lowe’s for $1 each, so I went back to Lowe’s to get more. (My cabinet is 24″ deep, so that length was perfect.) I needed thirty boards to fit the cabinet, but they didn’t have enough in the 24″ length, so I also bought several 48″ long boards that I sawed in half with the circular saw when I got home.

For the vertical dividers, I bought eight 24″x24″ squares of 5.2mm lauan plywood, cut to size at Lowe’s (my upper cabinet is 22-1/4″ tall inside, so they just had to cut a little off one side).  There are a lot of other material options you could use for the vertical pieces, but the lauan was cheap and easy and matched the interior of my cabinets pretty well. If the cabinets were white inside, I would have probably used something else. But most of the other thin board-like material I found came in 8’x4′ sheets, which seemed like more of a pain to get cut to size. TIP: If you use lauan or other plywood, make sure you get it cut it to size along the grain of the wood, or it will splinter badly on the edges. Fortunately, I found this out on the one I had Lowe’s cut as a test to make sure I got the size perfect. Then when I went back to buy the rest of the lauan, I knew to specify which direction they should cut it. 

The only thing I wasn’t sure of was the best way to install the poplar boards into the cabinet. My husband immediately suggested we buy a brad nailer. (He’s been angling for one ever since he found out his small air compressor was enough to power one.) We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a brad nailer, so we ordered this onefrom Amazon for only ~$30. And then even though he’s the one that wanted the brad nailer, he let me use it to install everything! I wanted to at least help since this was my project, but it turned out it was easy enough to do all by myself.

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I nailed the first boards in on the top and bottom, flush against the wall of the cabinet. Then, at my father’s suggestion, I put a piece of lauan up against the first pair of boards, so I could get the right spacing between each pair of boards. I nailed in the second pair of boards by pushing them snugly up against the lauan. This made the lauan a tight fit, but they still slide in and out with little effort. I kept sliding the one piece out and moving it over by one board until I didn’t have much room left in the left side of the cabinet to maneuver the brad nailer in there. Then I started using a scrap of the lauan from when they cut it at Lowe’s to do the spacing for the remaining boards, because that gave me room to hold the brad nailer.

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Here’s what the cabinet looked like when I finished installing the poplar boards. Then I just slid in the lauan dividers every 2-3 boards.

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Here are the final results. I basically just put all the same stuff back in there, but I already know I need to re-arrange things now that this cabinet makes things so much more accessible. I need to move the serving trays and other stuff I rarely use to less convenient storage locations, and put more frequently used items up here.
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I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

33 thoughts on “Kitchen DIY: Adding Cookie Sheet & Tray Storage Above the Oven”

    • I was thinking it might be easier to buy sheets of luan the same size as top and bottom interior and glue strips or brad nail them BEFORE installing it in the cabinet. Doing on a flat counter then putting it up. Saves on going up and down a ladder and bending into the high cabinet.

  1. Thanks so much for this great idea! I have a cabinet above my refrigerator that I want to put dividers in, and this looks like just the easy and inexpensive project for me to do. Thanks again!

  2. I want to thank you for such a fantastically simple solution for organizing my bakeware. I saw this yesterday and emailed the link to my husband, who suprised me by adding this to one of our cabinets the same day! He had all the supplies in his shop already and opted to use construction adhesive to install the wooden slats. I’m grinning ear to ear at the new ease with which I am pulling out those sheet pans! I’ve pinned this idea for others to see on Pinterest. Thank you!

    • I’m glad you found this helpful. How nice to have a handy husband that could implement it so quickly! Construction glue for the slats was a good idea. The nail gun was just so fun! 🙂

  3. I have been looking for ideas to divide the upper half of a cabinet where I’ve planned to put my baking sheets. This idea is perfect. Now to see if I can get the Husband on board!

  4. THANK YOU! I saw this a couple days ago, thought I’d pinned it, and have now spent the last 3 hours “re-finding” it! *L* It is now permanently set in my email. this is a perfect solution to the cabinet over my ovens…and infinitely less expensive than the kitchen design people want me to pay for it. GREAT idea…thank you again!

    • Make a box that fits into the cupboard, then use a router to carve grooves; quicker and easier than gluing all those bits of plywood.

      • If I had a router, or knew how to use one, I probably would have just routed grooves into two pieces of plywood for the top and bottom of the cabinet. But I found it pretty quick and easy to use the brad nailer to nail in the strips of poplar that I bought. No glue needed. This is just a simple DIY project for a mom without real woodworking tools. 🙂

  5. That’s what I was thinking I needed to do because the “designer” at the kitchen shop either didn’t want to spend my money there (even though I told her I wanted wooden ones) or the cabinet makers don’t make them (??? & they’re carpenters??). She offered the wire ones so I declined & decided to make my own, and with your step by step I will be able to do it! It looks really good in your cabinet. Wonder if Hubs will want a brad nailer…don’t think we have a compressor though. Yet.
    Thanks!

  6. After looking this over with my handyman (my husband) he would have kept the horizontal shelf and built the vertical dividers on top and bottom. You have a lot of wasted space on the top, although some of the pans may be too wide to slide in on their side. Still a great idea.

    • I’m glad you like it! I actually wanted it the full height because I have a lot of large pans, and our cabinets go very high, so a top shelf would be wasted space without a step ladder.

  7. OMG! I’very been want to do something like this in our kitchen for years. But I could not come up with an easy way to do it. I thought about routing grooves in a top and bottom board but that was more work than I wanted to do. Your solution is fantastic. Thank you very much.

    • We don’t have a router, or I might have considered that option. But I thought this was a lot easier for me to do and causes minimal damage to the cabinets in case it needed to be removed.

  8. This is absolutely brilliant. Like the writer above, I was going to rout grooves in the cabinet, but one mistake and you’ve messed up an expensive cabinet. This is so much easier. I might use slightly thicker boards for the dividers so that they don’t have a tendency to bow. Thank you.

  9. Love this idea! Been wanting to do this forever. Thanks. Just thinking, for those who want it temporary, could it be made as a box, with the grooves, and just set in the cabinet?

    • Sorry for the delay! I just saw your comment. Yes, I assume you could make it as a box that fit inside the cabinet if you couldn’t alter your existing cabinet.

  10. Such a great idea. This is much cheaper than the price cabinet shop gave me, and really simple and easy to do. Thank you so much

  11. I just did this after pinning your post months ago. I chose a lower cabinet with a drawer over it; that presented it’s own challenge. So I attached my poplar strips to a piece of luan that I cut to fit the horizontal dimensions of the cabinet interior. I added nailers to the front and back of the interior so I could screw it in to hold it up. Doing the poplar strips that way was so easy that I did the bottom the same way. That extra thickness resulted in less of a lip on the bottom of the cabinet as well.

    An issue I had to deal with was when Lowe’s ran out of luan sheets, (my use of horizontal pieces meant I had to go back for more). So I went to Home Depot, and had them cut a 4×8 sheet into four manageable pieces. They were half the price that way. When I got them home, however, I discovered that they we’re thicker!! I’d already installed my “grooved” boards! I spend hours sanding the top and bottom edges down enough so they would fit in the grooves!! Of course I could have saved those for another project and waited for Lowe’s to restock, but who’d want to do that?!

    I’m so happy I did it! In my lat house we screwed those metal ones in. This is so much cooler!

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