Kitchen Cubby Refresh
Today’s quick project is brought to you by random things we had on hand, my favorite storage cubes from Amazon, and lots of frustration.
This was the situation in our kitchen. It was 100% make shift at this point. Both the storage cube shelving and the utility cart landed in the kitchen because of rearranging in other parts of the house. Neither was intentional, but both were semi functional, so I tried to go with it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always make for a good solution. The shelving held our winter gear (which needed to be packed up), masks, sports gear, lunch boxes, drinks and other random things - along with our microwave and charging station. The cart became shoe storage because the amount of shoes that live in our kitchen is absolutely ridiculous and I was tired of picking them up off the floor.
It might not look terrible in the picture, but the reality is that no one put their shoes on the cart (there was a shelf for my husband, and one for each of my daughters - I keep my shoes organized nicely on another shelf), so they were always on the floor. The cubbies functioned ok, but they were underutilized.
Enter my favorite storage cubes (linked above!).
I was looking them up for another project when inspiration struck! I grabbed a pack for myself (they come in a 4 pack), and started thinking about how I was going to use them. I knew I wanted to move the shoes into the bins because then they could be tucked away, but I only needed 3 shoe the shoes. They would go on the bottom shelf for easy of pulling out. That left me with an extra bin to use. The winter gear was already in bins and needed to be put away until next winter. What was left then was our masks, drinks, and random sports gear. Our masks already have a good system, and the drinks would be less accessible in a bin, so sports gear it was! We are not sporty people, but my husband and I both run, so we have random running accessories, and he likes to bike and box, so we have things for that was well. The bin was the perfect spot to stash all our exercise gear that was easily accessible for when we needed to grab it. Problem solved! Now I just had to wait for the bins to get here.
Once they arrived, I already had my plan in mind, so I was able to get right to work. I took everything out of the shelves and gave them a good wipe down. Then I packed up the winter things and put them in their off season home (the back of a closet with all our other snow gear). I moved all the shoes into their new bins and popped those into the bottom shelf. Then I moved the drinks up a shelf, put all our exercise gear into another bin and put it in the middle, and finally I just put our masks back where they were because it works! Finally, I labeled all the new bins so everyone knows the system. Now the former shoe cart is empty, so I moved our kiwi crates that the girls haven’t done yet over there for now.
My next project will be transforming the cart back into a craft cart (which was its original purpose way back when). Stay tuned!
I was so excited to take an after picture that I didn’t get one after I labeled the bins. Whoops!
A closer look at the shoe bins. We have too many shoes.
Here’s how the top shelf looks now - and a close up of our exercise bin.
