The Crunchy, Country Mama: Kitchen Cabinet Organization

*edited to add pictures!*
We had an impromptu kitchen cabinet organization party last night. (What, doesn't everyone do that sometimes??) When I say impromptu, I mean I walked into the kitchen and my dear husband was taking everything out of one cabinet. Well, alrighty then, we're organizing cabinets tonight!

I wish I had some "before" pictures. If I had known DH wanted to do it this week, I would have taken some, but oh well. Such is life. Just trust me when I say the cabinets were in desperate need of some help.

I think what motivated DH last night was all the dishes and platters still sitting on our kitchen table when we got home last night. (Unfortunately, the dish fairy didn't come while we were at work yesterday and do that for us - bummer.) We already knew we weren't cooking supper, thanks to all the leftover baby shower food, so we had some time on our hands. I got quite a bit of laundry done last night - go me! And DH was very productive, as well.

When we first had our house moved to the land (way back in 2008, before we were even married - though we didn't move in until our wedding night), we had a lot of work to do. It would have been perfect blog content. (And of course, I didn't get a single "before" picture.) One of the things we did was remove the old, probably non-functioning dishwasher in the kitchen. Neither of us had ever had a dishwasher before, and I don't trust the things to get dishes clean, so I told DH I could live without it (there has only been maybe one time since then that I have regretted that decision, and we've been living in this house for almost 5 years now, so I think we're good). We had the space fixed so it looked nice again, and had a shelf put in there for storage. (We also left everything so that if we ever changed our minds, it would be easy to install a new dishwasher.) I even opted out of adding a cabinet door - I just hung a curtain on a dowel rod instead.

In the beginning, I purchased 2 baskets that I used to house our dish rags and dish towels. And for a while, the rest of that cabinet stayed nice and organized and clean. But of course, over time that cabinet became sort of a catch-all for the kitchen. Extra storage containers (please tell me we're not the only ones who save every single Cool Whip container and jelly jar!), extra jars, and a few very random items ended up in that cabinet. It was a mess.

DH decided last night he wanted to put some of our serving dishes and platters in that cabinet. Most of the dishes and bowels were being stored on top of the big freezer in the laundry room, and there's still a ton of serving stuff up there (and yes, we really have a ton of serving dishes! Its kind of our collection, I guess). But the big platters were being stored in the same cabinet where we keep pots and pans, and it was super hard to get them in and out. So they got moved to the old dishwasher space.

My 2 baskets ended up fitting on the top shelf, and a bunch of serving platters went on the bottom. We even had room to store some corningware dishes down there (that come with wire racks to hold them up). When we moved those, it prompted us to work on the cabinet where they were housed. (I'm seeing now that pictures would be really helpful here. I'll try to take some tonight and update this post.) That cabinet was another hot mess.

On the other side of our sink is a cabinet that goes from the floor to the ceiling. I had the fronts of the top 4 cabinet doors removed and replaced with glass, and we store our beautiful china in there. We eat off our china every night, its not just for show! But its such a pretty pattern that we wanted to display it.

See? Pretty, huh? We have enough of this pattern that it takes up 2 full cabinets (and then we have extra stored elsewhere, in case any of it breaks). People were good to us at our wedding showers. ( :

Anyway, we've done a good job over the years of keeping those 2 cabinets neat, since you can see what's in there without opening the doors. But the cabinet below them....*shudder*

It was so bad that sometimes when you opened one of the doors, stuff fell on you. Luckily, it was the bottom cabinet, so stuff didn't have far to fall, but still. Not cool. I usually try to avoid needing anything that's in that cabinet, that's how bad it was.

Not anymore! Its nice and neat in there now, too. Yep, definitely gonna have to take some pictures tonight. This morning I glanced in both cabinets that we reorganized and just stared in awe. Seriously. I'm weird like that.

And please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks her husband is seriously hot when he's organizing kitchen cabinets? ( ; hehe (Any type of cleaning, really...lol!)

Next on my mind (and DH's, too, I believe) is to tackle the cabinets of pots and pans. Talk about a mess. Probably at that same time we'll organize the cabinet under the island. I don't even know what's all in that one. I think if we had a day or 2 to stay home and do stuff around the house, we could accomplish a lot. If only....!