Operation Organize Kitchen

We have lived in our house for four years now. I love our house, but I have a hateful relationship with our kitchen. For example, it has a dishwasher, but since we are on well water, we don't have enough water pressure and the dishes come out looking worse then when they went in. But that's okay, because I used it for something else that is lacking in my kitchen...storage. The cupboards are few and the ones we have are small.

About 18 months ago, I feel in love with my mother in-laws new shelf in her kitchen. I saved up my pennies and with some Christmas money, I was able to buy one. But I decided my craft room was more of a disaster zone, so it went in there. (You can see pictures of what a difference it made on THIS POST.) Then Josh's job got real slow and money because something I wasn't willing to spend.

Here is what my kitchen has look like for years now because I've never really had room for anything. All the cupboards didn't close all the way, because they were stuffed as full as they could be.

The corner by the door. Sad, I know.
This is the table. I hear people actually eat off of them.

And my counter top. Usually there isn't that many cereal boxes, but with Josh working far from home, I don't like cooking so cereal has become my new staple food.

Last week I went to Lowe's and bought the shelf I've been dreaming about for over a year now. It was better then Christmas. It opened so many possibilities. Before I knew what I was doing I had emptied one cupboard onto the counter so I could scrub it down and empty a different cupboard into it. I had no idea how much work this shelf would require. I spent my entire day off yesterday reorganizing my cupboard. Guess what? They all shut tightly now! And I have room for when I start cooking again and doing real grocery shopping again!

The funnest part of the day was going through my tupperware containers. I had 35 lids that had now container to go with them. There was 7 containers that didn't have lids. I'm getting rid of the ones I have cussed for years because I don't like how they seal and I can't wait to get new ones.

Here's the after pictures. I'm so in love with my kitchen.

Another change I made was I put the cat food on a little rug. Zipper thinks the only way to eat is to grab a mouth full of food, drop it on the floor, and then eat half of what he drops. Ally chases the other half around and I end up stepping on little bits of kitty food. This has been so much better.

Our next home project is we are going to finally start painting inside the house. Hopefully we'll start that next week. Wish me luck because I will be doing most of it myself. We've decided on white walls, white doors and black trim.