Fabulous Kitchen Stuff

I promised to share what I did with my kitchen one evening while my daughter was with my in-laws and my husband was out of town at a nerd convention of some kind. I went to Lowe's one evening (a very dangerous place for a woman with a new house) and spent a little bit of money on some organizational needs for the kitchen. Since I was losing a tad bit of kitchen space, despite not losing any cabinets, I needed to be really organized. My cabinets at the new house are not as wide as my old ones, so even though there are the same number they won't hold as much. Thankfully some of this is off-set by my fabulous pantry, but for the most part I needed to be really tidy.

I really wanted those uber cool cabinet sets that slide out and create new drawers and stuff for the kitchen...but i would have had to spend around $800-ish on everything I kept drooling over at Lowe's. That wasn't going to happen. So I went a less expensive route and came up with this instead.

  used a couple of the same rack to store my metal pans and glass bakeware, and purchased a frying pan rack for those. They are all screwed to the floor of the cabinets. Then I got a couple of individual metal pieces to create storage for my stoneware bar pans and cookie sheets. The metal cookie sheets are in the drawer under the stove.

 This long metal rack worked well for my pots. I hate stacking them all together and having to dismantle the pile to get the pot you need. This cabinet didn't have any separation in it so the rack was perfect and it's adjustable so I could make it whatever size I needed it to be.

 This is my favorite purchase. I hate plastic silverware containers. They're never the perfect size for the drawer. Never! This is an adjustable bamboo drawer organizer. It was the most expensive single piece I purchased at $24.99, but oh so worth it. Look how pretty. The only thing that annoys me at the moment is that it's about 2" too short for the drawer, so when you open it sometimes it has slid to the back creating a little gap at the front. So I may stick something back there to keep it from moving.

Bamboo made another appearance in these drawer divider pieces. They are adjustable too so they can fit whatever drawer you need them to, and you can space them however you like because they're just a single strip. I may end up with a few more of these before it's over with because I reused the silly plastic silverware divider I already had in a random utensil drawer. It was a cost savings, but not one I was overly happy with. The drawer I used it in is only 10" wide though, so there's not many options for the narrow of a drawer out there.

Nick always complained about the knives being in a drawer where they were accessible to Kate, which is a valid complaint. I didn't want them just thrown up in a cabinet either though, so I took this metal drawer organizer that used to hold miscellaneous utensils at the old house and stuck all the knives and those sharp corn-on-the-cob pointy things in it, and I sat it on the bottom row in one of the cabinets. The kind of ingenius part is that it's too wide for the cabinet, so it has to sit in there at an angle...but that means you can see what is laying in each compartment and for us short people, that's handy.

All of this kitchen organizational fun took me about 4 hours to install and unpack and set up. I'm very pleased with it!