cabinet chaos contained.

Let’s be blatantly honest: the cabinet over the microwave and stove should be banned. Like seriously. If a cabinet has over 50% of its space consumed by a metal vent, it’s completely worthless. No matter how hard you try to keep it neat and orderly, it almost always falls into disrepair. It’s too small, too high, too mis-shaped, and too ridiculous to serve any real purpose.

Now that you know how I really feel, cue the “Psycho” movie soundtrack because here comes our cabinet…

Every spare part, appendage, accessory, or overall misfit went here. This single cabinet played host to our blender, mixer attachments, our immersion blender and its umpteen million accessories, a blow torch for crème brulee, and who knows what else. THE HORROR!

The madness doesn’t stop there, though (I know, I wish it was over too). We also have another sad excuse for a cabinet above our kitchen sink. It held our appliances that I use relatively often, but not on a daily basis: our food processor, crock pot, food mill, French press, and percolator.

This cabinet really wasn’t a huge problem – sometimes, there’s just not a good way to store such bulky appliances! The biggest problem with it was the unsafe storage of all of the blades for our food processor. Depending on the day, you could find them either crammed in the bowl of the processor or stacked on the bottom of the cabinet. Either way, I would find myself digging through the blades to find the one I needed, acting as if digging through razor-sharp blades WASN’T a bad hobby.

I headed over to Target where I found these baskets, then back home to begin classifying both cabinets’ smaller items into “mixer” and “food processor” items. After a bit of purging, the contents of each basket were narrowed down to this:

I have made a box of “possibly donating” items – they are accessories to either the immersion blender or my mixer that I have never used or whose purpose can also be fulfilled by another larger appliance (i.e. the mini chopper that goes with my immersion blender). If these items still have not been used by the time we move, they will be finding a better home!

Ultimately, after a bit of rearranging between cabinets, the cabinet over the microwave stand thus…

While the cabinet over the sink now houses the crock pot, food processor, and baskets housing appliances for both the mixer and food processor:


Here is a close-up of the baskets:


As is always the case with small kitchens, the space is not ideal, but I do feel that we have created a more usable, efficient space in which to work. All it took was a bit of rearranging and compartmentalizing!

How do you use the space above your microwave or sink? Do you feel as much frustration about these cabinets as we did?