As a temporary kitchen, we built and temporarily powered
the actual kitchen island ahead of time in the basement.
Since the island has an induction electric cooktop, we
could take our time and not be eating microwave dinners,
and pizza for a year.
One of the drawers here is open and you can see that the drawer slides are hidden underneath. They are also conveniently full extension and soft-closing.
Automatic Opening
These are parts to a really slick setup from Blum Hardware called “Servo-Drive. the idea is that there’s a little motorized arm that mounts to the back of the cabinet that automatically pushes the drawer out whenever it senses that you gave the drawer a top or pulled on it gently.
Servo-Drive
Drawers that open with
a touch
Imagine drawers that open by giving them a short light push. Although they don’t automatically close themselves, the “Blumotion” soft-close makes them pretty cool.
This sOn the left is a sample 15” cabinet with its 4 drawers removed. You can see the Blum undermount slides and on the right, a closer shot of the Blum Servo-Drive actuators. The back of the drawer rests on the arm, which moves in slightly. That way it can trigger if anything momentarily moves it in and out or vice versa.
Here’s a drawer in the island. Note the complete lack of visible slides and also the full extension of the drawer to the face of the cabinet. Thank you Blum Tandem slides with soft-close motion (Blumotion).I’m sure I’ll cover this on another page, but we set up a temporary kitchen by building the future kitchen island in our basement and powering it temporarily. Since it had an induction cooktop and there was already a wet bar, we had no lack of cooking capability.