Hey guys! Finally, finally I’ve got the reveal of our organized kitchen cabinets ready to go!
Y’all, this project- it was no joke. I seriously, seriously underestimated the saturation index on this one.
ANYWAY….enough complaining! Here’s the before and after. Thursday, I’ll post some takeaways from this little project.
First- I didn’t add any filters or edit the pictures in any way, other than cropping my dirty floor out of a couple of them. I wanted you to be able to see the difference that lightening up with paint can make. So please excuse how dark the before are- I took these really early in the morning. Also, I only worked on the lowers because the uppers are pretty well organized already.
Finally- keep in mind this is a 122 year old farmhouse. The cabinets aren’t that old, but they’re old. So, if you’ve only seen new houses- or the newer farmhouses that are only meant to look like old farmhouses- welcome to Real Life Old Farmhouse Kitchens!
*This post contains affiliate links- see my disclosures here.
The before- dis- organized kitchen cabinets
Please don’t judge me on the before (or, well, heck, judge me if you must). As I mentioned in this post, these cabinets are hard to deal with.
Outside…
And inside…
It’s pretty terrible. But impressive how that toaster is balanced on the can opener, right?
I go through and organize that particular cabinet at least once a month. But it never stays that way. The boys pretty much just put stuff just in the general vicinity of where it goes. You can tell that our needs here are good storage for our plastic food containers, a way to organized medical supplies, and a much better place for our small appliances.
This is what the inside of the small random door to the side looks like. It was so dark in there that I had to use a flash to get it to illuminate….
We use it for our backup medical supplies (way too many first aid kits) and overflow plastic storage stuff. It’s super dark back there though, and very hard to reach, so we hardly ever actually use that space.
Here’s the cabinet to the left of that one…
And the inside (I’m only working on the far right- the others are under the sink, which is pretty organized, and the trash can)…
We put our dog food there because the previous owners had already installed this pull out thing, and we really didn’t know what else to do here to be honest.
Look how dark and terrible, and hard to reach, that corner is.
Here’s the cabinets on the left side of the kitchen…
And the inside…
So bad.
This little cabinet was so small that the only thing we could figure out to do with it was start stuffing our grocery sacks and paper towels in it.
Last one…
Inside…
And the corner was awful…
For some reason, we started keeping some tools in this cabinet. I can’t remember why that started- I think it was a gradual migration when we started doing more and more DIY projects. But there’s a drill, a full set of screwdrivers, and a couple of other things. Notice how dark it is!
Organized kitchen cabinets- the plan and the during
As I mentioned in my plan of attack, my plans were pretty simple- lighten and brighten with paint and new contact paper, spend a little time determining what storage would fit and then add usable storage with baskets and shelving, and purge!
Purge
First I cleared everything out. The kitchen was a disaster. Here’s the pile of plastic storage containers alone!
Sheesh. Probably 75% of those I don’t use. We gathered those, plus a pile of other stuff that I cleared out (but forgot to get a picture of) for a yard sale.
Lighten and brighten
This made a world of difference. Here’s some completely unaltered pics- see the difference?
Storage
Finally, I added the function back to this space with baskets and gadgets.
That wide open space with medical supplies, small appliances, and storage containers? Here’s the after:
The bottom two baskets hold our storage containers, and the upper two hold our medical supplies.
I also ordered smaller baskets to corral like items…plus, since that tiny door is pretty much unusable, whatever we pull out of there needs to be small to be functional- I realized that was one of my big mistakes before, storing larger storage bins there that never got pulled out because of size.
One of the smaller baskets holds shoe and boot polish. You may not guess it, but Michael is quite diligent about shoe care 😉 Now he can just reach down and pull the basket out!
The other basket holds napkins that we use when we entertain (usually tailgates). We can just grab the basket and go!
These baskets are awesome! Super heavy duty but lightweight, and they come in lots of colors, and the price is excellent.
One of the best things was turning the area that was dog food storage into a tool storage area (we moved the dog food to the broom closet). We’ve already gotten so much use out of this area!
It’s so nice to just reach in and grab what we need instead of having to search through that dark cabinet!
In the corner, I purposefully kept it light- just a few of the larger Tupperware containers, and our extra paper towel storage:
See the huge difference that painting made? Again, no filters, no lights on in the room.
Here’s the other side of the room. This side got a real overhaul with the addition of a simple shelf:
The shelf wasn’t there before, but it made a huge difference. It was super simple- see that bracket in the back? That’s it. I just added it to the back and the side, and a small bracket to the right. The shelf is just sitting on it- I didn’t attach it in case I wanted to take it down later.
I decided to put my mixing bowls in the corner because that basket with our grocery bags is super easy to move around. Our trays are to the right of the mixing bowls.
Adding the cutting board storage to the door made a huge difference! Having them on the door in one place instead of sliding around in the cabinet just brings a little bit more happy to my world 🙂 That cutting board storage can also be over the door if you don’t want to attach it, and can be found here.
Finally, here’s the last cabinet. Most of my cookware is here, and I added pot lid organizers to the doors here (LIFE CHANGING!):
If you do nothing else, organize your pot lids. I don’ know why I waited so long to do this, but good gracious it has made the biggest difference not to have to catch these every time I open that cabinet! You can find the ones that I ordered here.
And here’s that corner. I put our largest soup pot, and our cast iron skillets, on top, and a few pyrex pieces on the bottom shelf.
And that’s it!
I’ll be back Thursday with some takeaways from this project! Please share the love, and Pin away!
Edit: Here’s an update post to how these cabinets are functioning for us, 8 months later!
