Kitchen re-organization

Every 6 to 9 months I feel possessed to rearrange the kitchen.  We've lived in this house for two years and sometimes I just get to a point where I say to myself "This setup just isn't working."

Now not everything was wrong with my kitchen.  The cans work great where they were and I liked the kids' snacks and potatoes in the cabinet where I had them.  But the bakeware was a problem as was the limited counter and drawer space.  I had also had an idea that I wanted to find space to implement.

I have this giant shelf in my kitchen that is open with no doors.  My mom suggested I put curtains there but to be honest I would HATE the hassle of moving curtains to get to stuff.  Lazy?  Perhaps but at least I know this about myself and didn't waste time with curtains.  When we first moved in I used these two shelves for pasta and cereal and canned goods as well as our plates and bowls and cups.  But it was messy.  No matter how "organized" it was it got messy quickly and was just an eyesore.

Before:

First before picture

old after picture

After:

Moving the bakeware out where I can see it (and KOJ can see it) makes it easier to get what I need when I need it.  I also think it looks neater than the food stuff that changes on a regular basis.

The next thing I had to tackle was the counters.  I just felt like they were always so clogged and I needed more counter space.  So I did something a little bit radical and I took the microwave out of the kitchen.  I put it in the laundry room, near an outlet so we could still use it as needed, but it freed up a TON of counter space.  In the above pictures you can see that the toaster oven used to be underneath that shelf but now it's not.  This is what I did:

Before:

After:

Moving the crock pot over here with the toaster oven also freed up more space on the counter near my mixer.  There is only ONE spot in my kitchen where my mixer can go because of it's height so I can't really move it around.

Before:

The food processor is now stored in the laundry room and the knife block is on the black coffee shelf.

I was able to move my sugar and flour canisters onto the baking counter next to my wooden spoons, spatulas, and measuring spoons.  Measuring cups are in the drawer on the right and hot pads and trivets are in the drawer on the left.  The cabinets underneath hold my extra flour, sugar, etc and our griddle which we use at least once a week.  The cabinet above has my regular baking ingredients - baking soda, cocoa, baking powder, salt, etc.

Above the stove I added this:

Which I bought at IKEA back in May.  It looks great and it opened up the drawer directly to the right of the stove for the hot pads and trivets.

I did a few more things but the last thing I'm going to mention in this post is the idea I had a while back but hadn't found space to implement.  I thought it would be cool to have an area where I could put stuff for our weekly meals all together so I didn't have to dig through the cabinets at the last minute.  So I did this:

The kids lunch stuff used the be on the bottom shelf with some old baby food.  I put our breakfast stuff on the top shelf with my cookbooks and the bottom shelf is our meal shelf.  I divided it evenly into 7 and labeled each space - meal 1, meal 2, meal 3 etc.  Now when I put away the groceries each little section gets the non refrigerated items for each meal put in it.  I'm still getting used to having this shelf - both when putting the groceries away and when getting out my stuff for supper.  But I think in the end we're going to LOVE it.

I also moved the kids' plates/bowls/cups and found a new space for our leftover storage containers but I'll do a 2nd post on those areas one day next week.  I also added a fun change to the cabinet where the kids' snacks were stored that I will share in that post as well.

Hope you enjoyed the changes I made to our kitchen organization and maybe got some new ideas for your own spaces.