Reach for the sky!

When Isaiah and I bought our house, the kitchen looked like it had a TON of storage space! Since the cabinets were all a plain oak color, it felt like there was wood grain everywhere, but once we really thought about it, there wasn't much space to store all the kitchen gadgets I collect things. Our kitchen cabinets go all the way to the ceiling, which is fantastic, but since the cabinets are all on the wall with the windows, where there could be cabinets, there are windows and then small cabinets above the windows. So while it looked like a ton of space, we really only had one full set of above-the-counter cabinets (and I can't reach half of it because it's so tall). Our other above-the-counter cabinet set is above the stove and it contains the vent for our range hood, so it's not full storage either.

Our kitchen is an eat-in kitchen with a wide open space as soon as you enter the kitchen from the dining room (which will hopefully someday turn into a half wall/counter something that ties the rooms all together.) But until then, this empty space wasn't conducive to storage, and we had considered buying a huge cabinet/pantry unit, we couldn't find one sturdy enough and cheap enough and we didn't want to build one, because there are so many other things we'd like to build that it didn't seem that urgent.

[Here's the part of the post where we solve that problem.]

Isaiah and I had a date night at IKEA about a month ago, and we I fell in love with these almost floating shelves that would look PERFECT along the wall across from the cabinets, leading to our sunroom. The only downfalls were that the kitchen still hadn't been painted and the shelves were out of stock. So Isaiah took care of painting the kitchen, and I took care of the shelves (by stopping by IKEA once every week or so until they were in stock on Saturday). We purchased four of these with a connecting bracket to put two long shelves end to end. (At IKEA they sell the shelves and brackets separately.)

From my other post on shelving you might have learned that measuring is not top priority in buying shelving. But this time I measured first and promptly forgot how long the wall was. So I got home and realized that the shelves are each 47 inches long, so they are 94 inches end to end, plus we needed just enough space for the brackets, and the wall I had picked was 93 inches long. Which led us to plan B...

We decided rather than doing really short shelves, or returning them, to just move the shelves to the open eat-in area of the kitchen. Isaiah spent sometime Sunday afternoon putting these gorgeous shelves on the wall with some heavy-duty, 300-some pound rated screw attatcher things (because I don't remember the technical term, go figure). This mostly completed the look of the kitchen and give me a place to put my fun dishes! While it looks very similar to my favorite relaxing hangout in Kansas City, T. Loft, it makes our kitchen look SO good!

More on that paint job soon!