Kitchen Problems... and Solutions

Last Friday I promised some photos of our Ikea purchases in action. We bought some Ikea items for a few different rooms in our apartment. However, today I'm going to focus only on our tiny kitchen. I say "tiny" because our current kitchen quite possibly has one fourth the storage that our last two kitchens did, and that's being generous.

Our current kitchen has me dealing with one of those you-don't-know-what-you've-got-til-it's-gone moments. The last two apartments that we lived in had kitchen islands. How I wish we had a kitchen island right now! Lack of kitchen storage forced us to put some dishes into our storage closet, and I realized that we would need a shoe horn in order to put everything else away in our tiny kitchen. Thank goodness there was a little extra room in the pantry for storing some things.

Our major problem is that we have lots of kitchen items and not enough places to store them. Isn't that a fairly typical problem with apartment living?

I stored most of our pots/pans in our only lower cabinet. Yes, we only have one lower cabinet. The architect of this apartment (or possibly interior designer) should be spanked for that. Seriously. My guess is that the person who designed this kitchen has never even set foot in a kitchen. If they had, we might have two lower base cabinets. Don't get too excited!

The only place for some creative storage seemed to be inside of our kitchen pantry. I saw a bare expanse of wall, and a light bulb went off inside my head. My initial idea was to install some hooks and hang the pots and pans, but then we spent an evening at Ikea and everything changed! My husband actually spotted these Fintorp rails and it was love at first sight. I grabbed the coordinating hooks and off we went into the sunset into kitchen organizing heaven.

After a little bit of blood, sweat, and tears elbow grease, we had ourselves some extra kitchen storage. No more pots and pans on the ground inside of our pantry! It's really fun solving storage dilemmas with a little bit of creativity. (Did I really just say that? Nerd!) The designer in me loves seeing every bit of space utilized, so going vertical with storage seems like such a simple, but not often used, solution for our storage issues. We bought some extra hooks just in case I found some other things to hang from our new rails.

So far I'm really liking our new kitchen storage solution. Who needs base cabinets when you can install railings inside of the pantry?! Yeah. Score one for the small kitchen. Even the Swiffer wet/dry mop found a new home. Not to mention our coffee making funnels and a couple of random utensils found a new place to hang (pun intended) too.

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Maybe some day I'll be brave enough

to tackle this part of the pantry:

For now, though, I'll enjoy our

new and improved kitchen storage! (: