Little fix-up

I like to cook and I spend a lot of time in my kitchen. Many of our friends (and my husband) have been laughing at me since shortly after we bought our house when I started talking about renovating the kitchen. What makes it so funny is that we had the house built. The problem is, it was not a true custom house, and we've discovered that "builder's grade" is another word for "utter crap". Even "upgrading" certain things in our kitchen did not help us escape the inherent crappiness of our kitchen cabinetry. I've complained about my kitchen here before before, so I should not re-hash it anymore today.

Happily, we took some steps to improve things over the last two weekends. No, we're not renovating (Ok, so we did walk around the kitchen displays at Lowes and drooled over nice cabinets and granite counters, but it was just window-shopping). Instead, we got a kit to turn one of our cabinets into a pull-out trashcan, another to add a pull-out wood drawer to a different cabinet, some sheet pan dividers, and a small bookshelf. Installing the dividers and trash-can pullout required my husband to remove the existing cabinet "shelves" with a jigsaw (we're talking about the fixed half-shelves that are part of "builder-grade, industry-standard" cabinetry). The wood pull-out shelf was easier to install, and we can now actually see all of the little plastic containers that we use (before, it was a matter of emptying out the entire cabinet to find the one in the size you need). The little bookshelf fits under the short side of our island, and holds my cookbooks. With the sheet pan dividers, I can get out a cookie sheet without sounding like I'm bringing the house down--the stack of sheet pans, muffin pans, broiler pans, pizza pans, and cutting boards was a good foot high in there before. The trash can pull-out was actually cheaper than some of the standalone cans we've looked at recently, and doesn't get in the way of the door to the garage anymore--I resisted dedicating a whole cabinet to trash for a long time, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. All that, plus a little time sorting out things that we really aren't using has helped a lot. Not bad for a $200 "remodel", and less than an hour total of install time on my husbands part (Thanks!).

Ok, so I still want to re-do the kitchen. But, Charlotte keeps trying to swing on the cabinet doors, and I think there is still some finger paint on one of them that I missed the other day. Like the carpets that Charlotte keeps having accidents on (stay tuned for a potty training report), we should really wait until the kids are done tearing the place up before we spend a lot of money to make it nicer. I have cabinetry brochures to keep me company until then.