inside my kitchen

I’m pretty sure those cabinets are original to the house, which was built around 1940. They’re horrible, and I hate them. Somehow they’re just entirely non-conducive to storing anything. 

The electrical work is also circa 1940, which means that if I try to have more than one appliance going at a time (toaster and microwave, blender and iPod dock, etc.) I will blow a fuse. This makes it especially fun to cook breakfast, because I can’t, for example, make toast and a smoothie at the same time. 

The appliances were put in a few years ago by the owners of the house (we just rent), and they are nice and work well. Although after living here for three years, I still haven’t found a great way to clean stainless steel. Plus there’s no shortage of little sticky fingers around here to smudge things up. So they are pretty much always a little smudgy, and I’m okay with that. 

The main problem with the kitchen is that there just isn’t enough storage. You can see our hodge podge of random, mismatched cabinets. The white cabinet with the wood top is where I take 99.9% of the pictures for this here blog. It does have some really nice light from the giant windows, which I love. We’ve tried to be creative with adding some shelving and hooks to store things in the kitchen, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re renting (and poor students…). 

Our kitchen doesn’t have any sort of pantry, so everything is stored in the cabinets. I’ve tried a bunch of different systems, and so far this is the one that has worked best:

I love the OXO storage containers because they’re so simple and pretty, and I just made a little label with chalkboard contact paper, and then wrote the contents on with a chalk marker. I love that it’s so easy to switch things out when our needs change. And yes, it’s no coincidence that the largest container holds chocolate chips. 🙂

I’m excited about our move, because it means that we’ll have three bedrooms instead of two, and a larger kitchen. The only problem is that the kitchen looks like this: 

Yikes, right? That picture is from 2009, when we used to live in the very same apartment we are moving back to. Instead of being discouraged about my dismal kitchen, though, I’m already dreaming up ways to make it awesome. Like adding contact paper to the backsplash to lighten things up, and adding shelving for more functionality. Stay tuned, and with any luck I’ll have an updated look at my kitchen within the next few weeks!