I’d like to show you 2 cabinets in our kitchen that hold their own…and then some. And they do it on a daily basis. One is just to the left of our stove…
And the other is just to the right of our stove…
Here’s what they each look like opened…
The cabinet on the left pulls out on tracks to reveal where we hide our trash and recyclables. Trash goes in the front can while recyclable items get thrown in the back can. It’s kinda fun to teach our older son (5 years old) which items can be recycled and which ones cannot. As for our lil’ 2-year-old guy, I found a dirty napkin in the freezer the other day…we’re still workin’ on him.
The other cabinet houses all of our pots and pans plus a few strainers and even a stovetop griddle. The 2-tier shelving unit pulls out on 2 separate tracks to make removing and replacing cookware much easier.
We purchased both of these organization racks from Lowe’s and Handy Hubby installed them himself. (In fact, they were his ideas!) He basically had to destroy the shallow shelf that was inside our builder cabinets originally.
We did lose cabinet space for the trash/recycle system but gained space in the pots and pans cabinet. To us, it was worth it to get our trash can off the kitchen floor and to designate a space for recycling. Up until the cabinet organization systems were installed, we had to haul all recyclables out to the garage (i.e. we weren’t recycling as much as we could have been). Now, pretty much 99.9% of our recyclable items get where they need to be.
Instead of tearing out our boring builder grade kitchen cabinets (too pricey for us) we’ve decided to tweak them here and there to add form and function. Check in later this week to see how we customized another cabinet in our kitchen as a decorative (rather than functional) feature!
DIY, organization