I just made this same decision and I opted to go with cabinets. Now if only we could get painters to come out I could put the darn things together!
My reasoning for selecting cabinets over drawers:
- I can put a bin on a shelf and have it act just like a drawer for any "little stuff" I want to store.
- Shelves are adjustable so I can change things around to suit my needs easily
- Shallow drawers use up a lot of extra inches (all the space between and around drawers) so I'd get less storage in the same amount of space. Deep drawers would be difficult to use without burying things.
- I will be able to open my cabinets and see everything at the same time. Drawers, even if I opened them all, I can really only see what's in whatever drawer is on top. (And if I did open them all, it'd probably fall over and squish me, LOL.)
And lastly...between the options I had to choose from, cabinets (with doors) came out cheapest for the most square footage of storage that would fit in the area I have to work with.
I bought Billy bookcases from IKEA, with doors. I bought the deeper ones (about 15" deep) so figuring out how to best put the fabric in there confounded me a little but I just posted here and let the wise folk of QB figure it out for me, LOL.