Kitchen Tweaks

I'm generally happy with how my kitchen is organized. I'd love to have more space, particularly a proper pantry, but as it is now, it will do. We're working on a solution for a pantry that involved our small storage closet, some shelving and the assistance of Alex's dad.






I can't really complain about my kitchen. It's small, but it works. I'd love new paint, a back splash, new counter tops, different flooring and different (or at least painted) cabinets, but those are cosmetic issues and they will eventually get changed. Eventually. One day.

There were two spots that were bugging me a bit - our miscellaneous drawer and a corner cupboard when I keep cutting boards, cookie sheets, muffins tins and other flat things.

The drawer wasn't too bad for a catch-all - there were many, many, many sets of take-out chopsticks (I'm not entirely sure when we had Japanese or Chinese take-out last), a bunch of ketchup and soy sauce packets and a few weirdo kitchen utensils that we tossed, but that's it. With the exception if the roast lifting fork things, the turkey baster and the rolling pin (they're in another drawer), everything is in here and sorted.

It's amazing what three small containers can do for one unruly drawer! Everything had a place before but the whisk attachments for the hand blender and the mixer kept getting crushed, the pastry cutter floated around and the eight bazillion chopsticks where just really annoying. We have beautiful, lacquered chopsticks a friend from Japan brought us and we usually use those. We ask for our takeout without chopsticks and that usually keeps the number of extra chopstick to a minimum. If we were ordering chopstick food and there were more than six people, we could just ask for chopsticks then. I've never heard of a chopstick emergency...

I also tackled the corner cupboard. I had read somewhere about using tension curtain rods to make a rack for cookies sheets and other flat kitchen things, but I had been unable to find ones that didn't need hooks to attach. I was out a few weeks ago at a discount department store (you know, the one that sells off stock from other stores...starts with a "W") and was looking for something else and I saw this. It was less than $15, so I figured it was worth a try.

Our pans were all leaning against one another in the corner cupboard - well, flat-ish stuff, not just pans. There was a roasting pan and rack (not pictured because it was in the oven cooking a turkey) three cookie sheet, a pizza sheet, a bunch of cutting boards, and some muffin tins. T Hat glass loaf pan you can see there sort of held them up, but not really. In reality everything just slid down until the loaf pan ran into something else and nothing moved.

It drove me nuts! The kitchen in the blue house had a funny narrow cupboard with wooden dividers just for stuff like that.

This is the result. And it's so nice. Nothing falls over. There's no avalanche of flat stuff every time we take something out of here. The rest of the things in this cupboard have more space. It's great.

Side note: Does anyone know why we have holes cut in the tops of the corner cupboard (like the one you can see in this picture)? Both corner cupboard have similar cutouts. Does it have something to do with installation?

I'm slowly getting back on track with my 52 weeks of organizing list, so I'm linking to I'm an Organizing Junkie.