Point and Chute
Both designer and homeowner wanted to maximize storage space in the compact bungalow kitchen and couldn’t find space for a recycling bin, so remodeler Leslie King installed a commercial trash chute. Recyclables dropped into the chute slide directly into the homeowner’s recycling bin on the exterior of the house.
King, owner of Greymark Construction, in Houston, says that homeowners want to recycle but are generally unwilling to sacrifice cabinet space to accommodate a bin. Originally, King considered putting a recycling bin in the corner of the kitchen with a hole through the countertop to drop bottles and cans. But she found a better option in a commercial product. The self-closing door from All-City Metal fits in the backsplash under a window.
King says that during an open house for this project, guests enjoyed using the chute. And she is currently installing one for clients who first saw this detail on her website and wanted it for their kitchen, too. Setup: To install the door, King framed an opening in the wall and fabricated a metal liner to fit behind the trash chute door. The chute leads to an opening on the exterior wall of the house. It is trimmed like a small window and sits directly over the recycling container.
—Nina Patel, senior editor, REMODELING.
Dropping In
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In this large kitchen, interior designer Lucianna Samu, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., included a secondary trash can drawer under the counter for her client to use when working in a part of the kitchen that’s far from the main trash. Samu’s fabricator cut a 6-by-6-inch square out of the 1½-inch–thick butcher block countertop and notched out the top for an integral finger-pull. With today’s computer-aided cutting technology, Samu says, even stone fabricators can easily create such cut-outs. She has also designed similar countertop doors for composting. “Much of what you want to compost comes from the countertop, not the clean-up area near the dishwasher,” Samu says.
—Nina Patel, senior editor, REMODELING.
