It's All in the Details

We have lived with a chaotic dining room cabinet for the past 29 years, and each year I tell myself that I am going to do something to better organize the space.  The dining room cabinet is a "blind corner" cabinet that is blocked off from the rest of the kitchen cabinets by the location of the dishwasher.  It has long been a space to hold good silver, glass serving dishes, trays, tablecloths, placemats, napkins, and kitchen towels.

As the list indicates, I stored a great many items in that single cabinet, and those items always were piled on top of each other.  The cabinet had one shelf, and if I wanted an item in the back of the bottom shelf, I literally had to get down on my hands and knees and burrow into the mess like a gopher retreating into his underground burrow.

As I age, I realized that this gopher act was not going to be possible for much longer.  So I asked Rick to change this one last cabinet so that it would have what all of the other cabinets in my kitchen have: pull-out shelves.

This large cabinet needed organizational help!

He had to work around an electrical outlet deep in the cabinet that supplies power to my dishwasher, and he had to add a frame so that the shelves could slide out past the opening for the door.  He did a spectacular job of working around both of those problems.

Rick attaches the drawer slides to the cabinet frame.

Rick had to borrow from my gopher act in order to attach the frame for the drawer slide-outs.

The drawers themselves gave us a bit of trouble, but in the end, all is well.

I rearranged the cabinet so that the glass serving pieces are stored more conveniently in my kitchen cabinets.  The good silver also was moved to storage elsewhere since I rarely use it.

The top shelf.

Now I have a top shelf that holds aprons, baking linens, and kitchen towels.

The middle shelf.

The second shelf holds placemats and table linens.

The bottom shelf.

The bottom shelf accommodates those big serving trays that most cupboards have no room to hold.

An organized cabinet at last!

The result is that now I can easily find clean kitchen towels when I need one without having to pull out half the cabinet's contents to find what I need.  Rick did a great job, and the cabinet is both more organized and easier to use.