Organize - The Kitchen
I will apologize right now. There will be a lot of posts starting with “Organize”. See our word of the year post for a deeper explanation, but the kitchen (and in our case, the living and dining are part of it) was ripe for change. Two years in it worked, kind of. With it being an almost constant source of frustration it was time to take action.
From the original listing (mostly because we always forget to take “before” pictures)
Why
Why would we do this? It came down to two main reasons. First was that the upper cabinets were below head height. That meant that you could not stand around the island and have a conversation. Which of course is the main point of having an island! You would have to duck or lean over to see anyone. Second was the light. The room is relatively large, but there are not many windows. I do not know what the 70s had against windows, but these cabinets blocked the little light there was and effectively made the room visually smaller.
How
For us, the island cabinets were pretty straight forward. Of course, the first thing was to empty the cabinets. Then I looked at the inside of the cabinets for screws and just started pulling them out one at a time. I took my time and pulled them until the cabinet came loose. Then I would go to the next cabinet and start all over again. Generally speaking, cabinets are held at the back when there is a wall or in the ceiling if not. Also cabinets are usually screwed to each other as well. For the fridge cabinet it took a little more, but the process was the same. The only addition was that the laminate tiles were put in after the cabinet was in place, so we had to pull some of the tiles to get the larger cabinet out from under the soffit.
Future plans
We’ve now had a month or so with the new setup and we are loving it! The next steps would be to pull out the cabinets you see in the nook and put them in the place where you see the open shelving currently. To really do this we have to move our garage door, so that is probably the first thing we need to accomplish. Also we want to push the soffits up to the same height as the rest of the ceilings. The goal for that is to continue opening the space and just bringing in more light. Lastly, will be getting the upper cabinets we pulled placed on the backside of the island to get back more storage space. Once the nook cabinets are out we can then split that space. Half for a pantry and half for a simple entry bench when we have visitors.
Hopefully, that gives you some ideas of how you can improve your kitchen flow. The main thing is to take it slow and if you are only unscrewing things, they can always go back in place if you do not like it.