My House: The Kitchen

One of the highlights of our home culture is food. We have people over all the time for football, dinner, a glass of wine, game nights or whatever. We all gather over food.

So our kitchen is equipped with good basic tools and lots of dishes, ready to go at a moment's notice. We like it that way.

Our cabinet space, however, was not adequate for the volume, frequent access or sizes of our kitchen favorites. But again, my husband had the brilliant idea: We use the long empty wall in our kitchen to create some stunning storage.

With 2 relatively inexpensive wire shelving units, we created a whole new decorative storage system. Here are the details:

• The dishes used most often are stacked diner-style.
• Serving bowls and the waffle iron and griddle are all standing by for a quick "breakfast for dinner."
• The microwave is out of the path for anyone cooking so there is better traffic flow through the kitchen when we have several people over.
• Kitchen appliances that are heavy, bulky and don't fit well in cabinets are easily stored on the bottom shelf.
• The non-stick sauce pan and grill utensils hang on S-hooks at either end.
• The top shelf is mixed with used items and decorative bottles and pitchers to keep the display colorful.
• Large platters are standing at the back of shelves so they can be seen and remembered for use!

Next post: The Big Board (It's the reason for the little hanging basket on the end of the wire shelves, filled with colorful markers...)

(c) 2009 Sheri Smith Bertolini