Area #7: Kitchen

Well, I finally got it done.  The kitchen ended up being about as big of a project as I expected it would be.  It took several days mostly because I didn't have all of the supplies that I needed on hand to finish everything up.  My first project in the kitchen was to create a 'hot drink' station.  Before, the coffee maker was in one cupboard, the tea/hot chocolate was in the cupboard by the stove, the coffee was in the pantry, the mugs in the cup cupboard, you get the picture. Before picture on the left.  After on the right.  Now everything is right there when you want a hot drink.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this cupboard during summer time when we don't drink hot drinks, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

 The second area I worked on (with Ellen's help) was our junk drawer. While I was cleaning it out, I realized that I really like having a junk drawer.  There are always going to be those things that need a home, but need to be handy, but don't really have any other home because they're unique and can't be grouped in with other things.  Here's what my drawer used to look like:

Everything that didn't have a home got tossed here.  Several things got thrown out, or relocated and now it looks like this:

I even found $5 while sorting through stuff.  I decided that I like my junk drawer a little too much to get rid of it, and that it would take too much of my time to put all of these things in another place.  Besides, I have too many drawers in my kitchen anyway...

Next area: under the sink.  I've seen so many cute ideas for organizing under a kitchen sink.  None of them I was really able to apply to mine, but I still like how it turned out.

Before

After

This is the first time that we have actually hung up the metal rack hanging on the left door.  I've already used it a ton.  It helps keep the everyday things off the sink, yet still within reach.  This helps the sink area to look a lot neater without really changing much.

Here are two other areas that I completed recently but didn't get a before picture of.  The first is our 'toast' station.  We used to keep the butter and honey in that cupboard that now holds hot drinks.  The bread and toast were over on another counter across the kitchen away from the table.  The counter I moved them too was just a collector of tools or misc. other items.  Now it looks awesome and is super functional and close to the table.

Our 'toast' station

The other area is the counter space right when you walk in from the entry room.  Here I implemented an idea I saw in BHG to have an 'inbox' for all papers that come into your house.  This way you can sort and take care of them before they become a huge pile.  Kevin made this inbox for me and I put it here because it's where all of the papers end up anyway.  Now they look nice and contained.

The last project, and the one I'm the most excited about is my baking cupboard.  I've tried to keep it somewhat orderly, but it never really stayed that way and tended to get cluttered.  Here's my before picture:

I have a thing for glass jars (as you can probably tell already from the before picture).  They just look so neat all in a row and you can see right through if you're getting low on something, and you can see which item you're grabbing.  I also want to eliminate as much plastic storage as I can as it can leech things into your food.  My goal is to go all glass.  Eventually.  I'm taking baby steps to get there now.  I took all of my spices and many other items and put them into glass canning jars.  From 1/2 pints to quart jars depending on the item.  My spices now look like this:

I found the template for the lid labels on Pinterest.  They originated here and I just had to print them and fill in my items.  I'm loving the look.  Now my baking cupboards look like this:

And I even had to use the cupboard next door for enough room to show off all my cute jars.

I got two more areas done today, but no more time to write now.  Tune in next time.