Thursday, June 7, 2012

Organizing the Lower Cabinets


I know that it has been a while since I last did a blog post.  Things have been very busy around here lately.  My youngest P had his senior prom this past weekend and it was also my oldest P's 21st birthday.  We are also having some plumbing work done this week and I had to spend time in the basement cleaning up so that the guys can install some new pipes.  I've made sure to take lots of photos and it will be coming up in a blog post soon.

A few weeks ago I finally finished up my kitchen cupboards.  You can see the progress I made earlier here  and here.  Now I have finished up the lower cabinets.

This is our cereal cupboard.

Before

After
There's not a huge difference in this cabinet but I did take everything out and sand and paint the interior.  In fact, I painted the interior of all the cupboards that I am showing you today.

Next is the cupboard that holds all my bowls.

Before

After

I installed this handy slide-out tray that holds all my glass bowls and I got rid of the ugly pink colander.  I now have a new plastic one that sits on the top shelf but at the time of the photo I hadn't picked it up yet.

Now for the pot cupboard.

Before
As you can see, all of my glass bakeware were in a plastic container on the bottom.  It was supposed to be easy to slide out but it ended up being too heavy.  The pot lids were also stored in a plastic container.  It contained them but it was still hard to find the right lid.

After

I am loving the wire, pull-out tray on the bottom and the pull-out lid holder is great.  I added some shelf paper and the whole thing looks so much nicer.

Now for the best part, under the kitchen sink!

Before

Everything was simply crammed under there.  I emptied it out, took out the linoleum that was on the floor of the cupboard, painted and added some shelf paper.

In Progress

I then picked up this under-the-sink organizer.


What I wanted in that space was a slide-out tray like what was in the pot cabinet but mounted on the side wall with a small tray up higher.  Unfortunately, I didn't find one until two weeks after we finished this project.  What we didn't realize with this particular under-the-sink shelf is that, in the picture on the front, the drain line goes into the wall whereas our drain line goes directly down through the floor of the cabinet.  There was no way to simply slide the finished shelf into the cupboard.  Luckily Mr. P. is extremely handy and was able to build the shelf in place inside the cabinet.

After
I used a candy jar to hold all of my dishwasher detergent.  This way it won't get damp sitting in the box on the floor and I also used a smaller one to hold all of my SOS pads.  I was able to use some more of the vertical space than before and everything is visible.  

I have a lot more organizing projects on the go and I am looking forward to sharing them with you.  Do you have any kitchen organizing tips to share?




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