None of these show up on a pretty plan. All of them show up the week the cabinets arrive — when the fridge door hits the counter, the dishwasher blocks the corner, and the last door opens straight into the wall.
Nobody discovers these on a drawing. They are discovered on a Tuesday, with a delivery truck outside and a dozen boxes in the hallway, at the moment somebody opens the dishwasher and it hits the corner cabinet. Every one of the twelve below is free to fix now and expensive to fix then — and none of them require a designer to catch, only a plan honest enough to show door swings.
A kitchen plan looks finished long before it is correct. Cabinets tile neatly along the walls, the colours are lovely, and nothing on the page shows you that the fridge door will not open past the counter or that the dishwasher blocks the corner it lives beside. These twelve are the failures we see most often — all of them free to fix while the plan is still a plan, and all of them expensive the week the pallet arrives.
What they search at midnight “kitchen layout mistakes” — usually the night before ordering. Good instinct: this is exactly the right time.
Print the plan, sit down with it, and answer these out loud. If any answer is “I think so,” that is the one to check.
This is exactly why we built the planner around real cabinets rather than generic boxes: the sizes are the sizes that exist, fillers and end panels are part of the plan rather than an afterthought, and you can walk the room in 3D and open every cabinet door and drawer at once — turn on Edit 3D and press O — before anyone builds anything. Then click Design check on the 2D toolbar (the clipboard button, just before Quote) and it runs most of this list against your drawing — room beside the fridge for its door, a dishwasher too close to a corner, a run that ends at a wall with no filler, doors and pulls meeting in an inside corner, landing space beside the range, the clearance above it and the hood height, a working aisle under 42″, seating, a cabinet over a window, and dishwasher and fridge openings against standard sizes — and lists what it finds, each with a Show button that takes you there. It cannot measure your room, does not know your appliance models or how wide your window trim is, and is a reference rather than your local code. Right-click 📏 Measure and choose Space check (beta), and it marks anything standing in a doorway and any walkway under 36″ as you work. And the catalogue stops you drawing a 34″ base cabinet that no factory makes. With a membership, or a Designer or Studio account, you can resize a box on purpose; the planner then adds a star to its name (B18*, say) and prices it as a modified cabinet, or quotes it separately as a custom-built item when no stock box can be cut to that size — unless the new size is itself a stock one.
Almost every item on this list comes from the same root: deciding the look before deciding the logistics. Colour, door style and handle finish are the fun part, and they are also the only part that can be changed later without a delivery truck. Clearances, door swings, appliance openings and filler positions are the part that is permanent the moment the boxes are screwed to the wall.
So do them in the boring order. Measure, then place the appliances and their clearances, then fit cabinets around what is left, then argue about colour for as long as you like. A kitchen that works in a bad colour is a repaint. A beautiful kitchen where the dishwasher blocks the corner is a rebuild.
Forgetting the filler where a cabinet run meets a wall. Without it, the last door or its handle opens straight into the wall, and the fix after installation is a new door or a permanently half-opening cabinet. On a plan it costs almost nothing.
42 inches of clear floor in a working aisle, 48 inches where two people cook or someone works while someone else passes, and never less than 36 inches on a side that is only a walkway. In practice that means a room roughly 12 feet wide before an island is possible at all; narrower rooms are better served by a peninsula.
Enough to swing well past 90 degrees, because the crisper and freezer drawers cannot come out until it does. Put a 3 inch filler (never less than 1 inch) between the fridge and any wall or tall cabinet on the hinge side — a ¾ inch end panel alone does not count — and check the specific model's door swing rather than assuming.
Not hard against it. The open dishwasher door lands across the corner cabinet, blocking it and leaving nowhere to stand while loading. Keep a filler plus at least one cabinet, about 21 inches in all, between the dishwasher and an inside corner, and keep the sink on the other side of the machine.
Enough to put a hot pan down without turning around, on at least one side, and more on your main cooking wall. Never put a range hard against a side wall: pan handles stick out into the wall and the heat has nowhere to go.
Roughly 24 to 30 inches above a gas cooktop and 20 to 24 inches above electric, and always follow the hood's own instructions. Allow 30 inches from the cooking surface to an unprotected cabinet above. Choose the hood and its duct route before the cabinets, because the hood decides what fits above it.
Either works, but the decision has to be made before ordering. If the floor goes in first, the cabinets simply stand on the finished floor. If it goes in after, raise the cabinet feet by the thickness of the floor, or the new floor swallows part of the toe kick and the dishwasher opening, and the machine will not come back out for service.
Open every door in your head: fridge, oven, dishwasher and every cabinet beside them, and see what collides. Then walk the aisles, looking for 42 inches where someone works and never less than 36, confirm a filler at every wall and inside corner, check counter beside the range, make sure uppers clear the window and door trim, and verify the appliance openings against the real rough-opening dimensions of the models you are buying.
Walk your own kitchen in 3D, turn on Edit 3D and press O: every cabinet door and drawer swings open at once, and the collisions show while they are still free. The fridge and dishwasher stay shut on screen, so check those two against their spec sheets — a dishwasher door drops about 24″ into the room, and a fridge door has to get well past 90°.
Open the 3D planner →