MY STORAGE EXPANSION PROJECT

There is nothing like kitchen renovations to make you see how complicated we make our lives by owning too much stuff.

And, there’s nothing like owning a kitchen with way more cupboards than usual to make you see how having a ridiculous amount of storage space leads you to storing a likewise ridiculous assortment of such stuff.

Weirdly it was my interest in wanting even more ergonomically friendly storage options that set this renovation in motion.

This means, if all goes according to plan, by the time we are done this adventure I will have even more storage area than I started out with. This is even in spite of my swearing when I emptied out all those cupboards that a significant portion of it was not going back in when the reno job was done.  Knowing my penchant for hoarding totally useless things I’m not quite sure at this time which three items are not liable to make the cut. 

What I’m striving for here is more useful space.  Kitchens have evolved a lot over the past century.  My great grandmother probably didn’t have much for cupboards because she didn’t have much for crockery and her pots and pans were likely seldom not in use and put away.  Besides, that big old cast iron cook stove took up most of the space.  Her daughter inherited her mother’s kitchen and no doubt the dishes and utensils as well, but I don’t think anything else changed.

Women of my mom’s generation had no choice to get more cupboards – they were now into the Age of Tupperware.  Trying to corral all those bowls and lids is not for the faint hearted.  The struggle is real.

The kitchen I’ve operated for the past 37 years has double the cupboards any kitchen should have.  Half of them came with the original tiny kitchen of the original tiny house and the rest were doubled when we doubled the size of the house and the family.  The over abundance of spaces I can hide by closing cupboard doors is phenomenal.  I’ve been married twice, raised four kids, and attended countless Tupperware parties, and I throw nothing away.  My daughters live in terror of the day I die and leave it all to them.

And yet it would seem that it was not enough storage.  I wanted more.

Well, not so much more storage, as better storage.  Somebody (almost surely a woman) has come up with all kinds of smarter storage options.  Things like upright dividers to keep your multiple cookie sheets and pizza pans from avalanching when you’re digging for your muffin tins – speaking as one who has had that whole business land on her toes more than once, I am quite excited about a system that makes gravity work for me, instead of against me.

But so much more than that, I cannot wait for the drawers that are going to replace the deep lower level cupboards that sucked all my favourite bowls to their back, forgotten, hidden places waiting for a day I felt spry enough to hunt them down.  My spry days are getting fewer and farther between all the time.  These drawers are going to deliver my things to me without some kind of hunting expedition.

This is almost surely the last renovation we will do to my kitchen, but I feel that it’s the most important one.  I may have quite a few good cooking years left to me if I don’t have to fight my cupboards for their contents any more.

 A major part of the carpentry part is done and we await the cosmetic application of paint before the doors and hardware are put back on.  This is so exciting!

Meanwhile I’ve been losing sleep as I spend the hours of 12:30 until 3:15 every night deciding where everything is going to go.

Oh yes, and which three things that will go off to a garage sale in the spring.