PSA: Think Twice Before Storing These Common Items In The Drawer Under Your Oven

Your oven drawer might seem like the perfect solution to all your kitchen storage problems, as its depth and height are convenient for most odds and ends you want to hide away in your kitchen. However, don't just shove everything you can think of in there, as that could be one of the key mistakes you might be making with your oven. The space under your oven can get quite hot, so you have to be careful which items can withstand the heat or might get damaged, avoiding anything considered flammable and prone to warping in high temperatures, such as linens and plasticware.

Before you put anything in it, you should figure out if the drawer under your oven has a useful, little-known purpose as a warming drawer. A warming drawer uses low heat to keep food items from cooling down. If your oven drawer works this way, you should empty it of all items to make room for your next meal. However, it is also entirely possible that it is just a storage drawer. To find out, you should inspect the controls of your oven for any additional buttons or dials that you don't use or know the purpose of. If you can't find anything on the controls, you can look at the drawer to see if it has a dial on the outside or temperature controls on the inside. If there are no controls for the drawer, then you have a storage drawer, and you can start thinking about what you can store in it, and more importantly, what you can't.

The general rule of thumb for if an item can go in the oven drawer is pretty simple: If it's flammable or meltable, or susceptible to heat in any way, you should not put the item in the oven drawer. In its location right under the oven, the storage drawers can get quite toasty and end up damaging your belongings or worse, burning and destroying them entirely. Really, the only things you should be keeping in your oven drawer are heat-resistant items that you would put in the oven itself, such as pots, pans, and glassware.

Avoiding common fire hazards should be your primary concern when utilizing your oven storage drawer. To this effect, you avoid putting any linens inside it. Your kitchen towels and oven mitts can create a significant fire hazard if stored in the oven drawer. Additionally, any cookbooks or paper items, cooking oils, electronics, and cleaning materials should be avoided for the same reason.

Additionally, you should avoid placing items made from plastic, wood, and rubber, as well as nonstick items in the drawer. The plastic might melt and warp in your storage drawer, making the items unusable in the future. Any wood, such as your cutting boards, could warp and crack, breaking them or making them more susceptible to breaking. The rubber materials will become brittle, shortening the lifespan of these items. Nonstick items could suffer damage to their coating and even release dangerous fumes when exposed to prolonged heat.