Scraplog

Behind Closed Doors: The Kitchen

Since I got a few people requesting it, I decided to show you the insides of our kitchen cabinets. I know that I’m always curious to see how other people do things so I hope your curiosity is satisfied :) Are you ready for it? Heck, I don’t even know if I am!

First of all, I must set the record straight. I am not the organized one. If you ever take a peek into my craft room (a room which is all mine and my husband doesn’t lay a hand on it) you will see chaos. I’m good at organizing… I’m just not so good at keeping it that way. But my husband is. He might even be a little bit too good at it sometimes :) Another thing to keep in mind is that I wanted these pictures to be real so I didn’t do a single bit of rearranging before I took any of these shots. I simply opening the drawers and doors and fired away. This is our real life. Here goes nothing…

Our pantry. The largest space we have. The bottom cupboards have pull-out shelves which hold our pots, casserole dishes, and other miscellaneous large things. The top holds mostly non-perishable food along with our spices and a few more odds and ends. I like the side panels that hold our spices. It makes it really easy to find what we are looking for. You can probably tell, but in general we keep our food supply pretty low. We always have done it that way. Our fridge is that way too, pretty sparse. I hate it when our fridge gets full and I can’t find anything so it’s very rare. Both of us require just a few staples, bread, eggs, butter, milk, and cereal. And yes, we do cook, we just only buy what we need for a couple of meals and don’t keep much extra. I’m curious, are we weird? Or, do some of you do the same? Plus, we don’t have kids so I’m sure that would make a difference in our food supplies if we did.

Under the microwave is where our small appliances hide. Since, once again, they are on pull-out shelves, it makes it really easy to access everything. Anything from our blender, toaster, waffle maker, to food processor hangs out here. And a microwavable bacon plate. You’ve got to keep that by the microwave, right? Above the microwave we keep any miscellaneous cups and mugs along with our pitchers. While I was editing these pictures I noticed that the handles of the white mugs are all facing the same way. That’s my husband for you, you gotta love it :)

We somewhat have our kitchen broken up into zones. Like I said in the previous post, this is the baking/coffee zone. We keep all of our baking stuff here and use this area to make cookies, roll out pizza dough, pie crust, etc. It works really good for us and then I’m not running all over the kitchen to get the ingredients that I need. We also keep all of our cookbooks on the right side of the top cabinet, bottom shelf. The left side of the top cabinet is solely dedicated to coffee. Since my husband makes us coffee everyday we wanted it to be easy to access. The espresso maker is the only appliance I allow to be left on the counter. Below, we keep mixing bowls on the pull-outs. The drawers hold cookie cutters and our rolling pin. We also have a few more odds and ends but largely the drawers in this area are practically empty. Lastly, in the long drawer we keep our grocery list and a pen that is never to leave the area so we always have it when we need it. We keep it there so it’s next to the cookbooks when we are planning meals.

Like I said previously, the drawers in the island pull out from both sides so you can access what is in them regardless of which side you are on. It’s very handy! There is a stopper so the drawers don’t pull out all the way through :) This photo is with them pulled out on the side next to a baking zone. We keep rubber spatulas and measuring cups and spoons on this side.

If you pull those same drawers out on the stove side, you will see mixing spoons and wooden spoons along with our strainer and some more measuring utensils. Because the contents of the drawer can slide around, we don’t keep a lot in them. We try to just keep things in them that we might want for either side of the kitchen.

Moving on the the stove area. This is the one place where I would like to change things a bit. I really would like to get a pan organizer but for now they just all lay in a heap at the bottom of the cabinet. It’s also the only place that we don’t have pull-outs on the bottom (done on purpose so the pans would fit). I really want something so they will fit in vertically instead of horizontally. In the drawer we keep our oven mitts and aprons.

On the other side of the oven we keep our knives in the top drawer, our cooking utensils in the second drawer, cutting boards in the third drawer, and odd things like wooden skewers in the bottom drawer. In the top drawer we also keep a sharpie marker because we have large groups of company from time to time and so people can write their names on plastic cups to keep track of them during the evening. Random but it works :)

Lastly, I completely forgot to take a picture of this bank of drawers next to the sink but it houses our silverware and dishtowels in the top drawer. Cling wrap, aluminum foil, and zip lock bags are in the second drawer. Plastic storage containers are in the third drawer. And napkins, paper plates, and plastic silverware and cups are in the bottom drawer. We keep our trash and kitchen cleaning supplies under the sink. The top drawer under the sink tips out for our sponges and scrubbers.

And that completes the peek into our kitchen. I got the idea to do this post because someone mentioned it in the survey. Now that you’ve seen this post, do you want more like it? Or was this one a bit too boring for you? I promise, this is the most organized room in the house :) The others might be a bit crazier. And it’s completely my fault, not Jason’s. Ha ha!