Corner Cabinet Woes

Every now and then I focus on one project and I HAVE to do it, right away. This past weekend it was the corner cabinet in our kitchen. It is one that has a lazy susan and two shelves. Well it had two shelves and was a lazy susan. It isn't that way anymore.

<---This is what we had. Since we moved in I've been moving things around trying to figure out what I could store in this cabinet to make the best possible use of space. We started out storing our Tuperware here. It worked, but wasn't great. We found that we would just throw it in the cabinet instead of keeping it organized so the cabinet would get jammed with the Tuperware instead of turning easily. So next we tried our small appliances. That didn't work well either, most of them were still too big to really fit without scraping against the side of the cabinet. So we put the Tuperware back. We couldn't really switch the style of storage because the cabinet itself is rounded and I'm in no way comfortable with the idea of cutting that rounding out since I have no idea what the rest of the cabinet looks like behind it. Maybe we'll look into it eventually but not this time.


Well last weekend we decided that we were going to take advantage of the bar-stools that my Uncle and Grandmother offered us, but that meant we needed a new home for the trash can and the recycling. We've been having to move them into the bathroom every time we leave so Nico "Destructo Dog" doesn't get recycling and trash all over the house and make himself sick. I started thinking, "Wouldn't it be awesome if we could put them in the corner cabinet." So I started looking into it. First, I checked to see if the top shelf could come out without losing the support for the door. It couldn't. Then, I looked to see if we could take out that top shelf and rig some sort of support that would work for now. That was a no go. Finally, I decided to check to see would it work AT ALL if I just took out the lazy Susan and the shelves and attached the door like a normal cabinet. Well, it works. It isn't perfect, and we will need to replace the doors with something that actually works well whenever we decide what we're going to do with the cabinets (raise them?, add shelves?, paint them? etc). For now, this works and the Destructo Dog hasn't figured out how to get in there, or has lost interest because he can't smell it as easily, who knows. But so far, so good. This is what it ended up looking like :

This is how it looks open. I plan on making the "recycle" and "trash" labels a bit more fun later on, but that is a different topic. You can see that the door is still at an angle when you open it. That's because it is glued that way and at this point I don't feel like messing with that. I got some basic utility hinges and attached them to the frame, and then the door. It took 2 tries to find a good spot for them on the door, but since I don't see us keeping these actual doors later on, I wasn't worried about it, and the mistake holes were on the inside :-) I also got the wrong type of hinges at first. So I ended up running back out to Home Depot to get the right ones.

 Note: In this case, simple was better- I tried the fancy hinges first.

With the door shut this is how the corner cabinet looks. Now, you can probably see that it is sitting at an angle. My guess is that this has to do with the weight of the door and the fact that the door is a 90 degree angle so it just doesn't lay right. You might also notice that it doesn't sit all the way in the cabinet at the moment. It can close all the way, it is just harder to open, so a temporary handle is probably in the future. I thought about rigging one, but then I'm pretty sure Destructo Dog could open it. Once I attach a handle, I might look at one of those magnet latches to see if that evens out the door for the time being.



So there you have it. The project I thought of over the weekend and just HAD to do, and I love it- it is so handy and I don't spend all day worrying about the trash and my Tuperware stays nice and organized in its new home!

Organizing: Pots & Pans

Every now and then, Dork_Syd or I get the urge to organize, or re-arrange something. A couple weeks ago Dork_Syd got that urge about our living room/kitchen furniture and rearranged everything (with help from me once I got home from work). A week ago, about an hour before I had to leave for work I got a similar urge- only mine was to organize the pot cabinet. I really don't know why I had that undeniable urge, but I did. It might have been triggered by noticing a dent in one of the pot lids that came from pots falling over on top of it (but that is a guess). I remembered seeing a post on pinterest that suggested using command strips and hooks to hang the lids. Of course, I didn't pin that post apparently because now I can't find it. But there you go.

So anyway, an hour before I had to leave I got that urge and I went with it. I grabbed my tin of command strips and extra hooks and pulled everything out of the cabinet and proceeded to match up the size of the hooks with the lids. I ended up short so I have one pot lid that doesn't have a home on the door but that is ok. One is much better than the large number I had before.

Once I got the idea of the hook sizes needed for each lid, I attached the hooks to the door and tested the hang of the lids. I ended up having to move around a couple of the hooks- so it was a good thing I had extra strips because I needed a few of them! The first couple times I had the hooks too close together so the lids just toppled over. After a few mis-sticks I got the hang of it and finished up quickly! I put all the lids in their places, put the pots away and went off to work!

It was a quick and easy project that left that kitchen cabinet much neater! Now it's so much easier to find the lids that I need!