The day has come! You’re finally doing that kitchen remodel you’ve been planning forever!
Perhaps the biggest hue and cry we hear is “We need more storage!” And you probably do. If your good china lives in a box in the garage or attic, but you like to entertain and find yourself packing and unpacking it all fairly frequently, you do. Or if the coffee pot and toaster are the only things you use regularly, but your counter is cluttered with your juicer, blender, Nutribullet, and stand mixer because there’s no other place for them, yup, you do.
But the questions are how much more and what kind?
Maybe you’re a housewares addict and can’t resist a gorgeous, hand-painted bowl that caught your eye or that beautiful set of glassware. You don’t need either and you don’t really have room for them, even after rearranging everything in your kitchen, but they’re sooo pretty and were on sale. Or maybe you’re a little gadget crazy and have a couple of drawers full of extra spatulas and whisks and basters and pastry brushes and meat thermometers and… well, you know.
The first thing to do is go through the drawers and cabinets and see what you really need and what you can get rid of. Odds are that at least a third of what you’ve collected—especially in the drawers—you never use.
You’ll probably recover a lot of space—which isn’t to say that you won’t want or need more for the future—but it’s a start on figuring out what you do need, especially the kind of storage you need.
Typically, the options are drawers, cabinets, shelves and pantries, and you know the types of things you like to keep in each of them. But there are other options, too.
If you have a smallish kitchen with a high ceiling, and beautiful copper-bottom pots and pans, maybe hanging them from a rack suspended over a small island would do great double-duty as a space-saver and design element. Or maybe consider a lovely, custom pegboard along one wall (no, not that “thing” with a hundred holes that hangs in the garage or basement that your husband or father has for his tools) made of a stone or tile or metal that works with (or is even the same as) your backsplash. As a design element, it could be a great focal point for the room.
If you’re going for a more rustic look, either type of installation using, say, reclaimed wood, could work, even with well-worn pots and pans that show off how much of a cook you really are.
(End of part 1)