Kitchen shelf makeover

When we moved in, we really struggled with storage space in our kitchen. Although it is a pretty big kitchen, the one in our old house was bigger, with way more cupboard space. We had had it done a few years before we moved, and I had included a huge amount of storage in it (lots of pull out drawers in floor-to-ceiling cupboards).

Oh, how I miss you!

I realise now that I totally spoilt myself by giving myself all that storage space! Consequently, I had amassed a large quantity of baking equipment, cakes tins, cake decorating stuff, random ingredients, crockery etc etc. It was a bit of shock to realise that I could no longer keep all of this stuff within reaching distance in the kitchen. Even after stashing all my cake decorating stuff (the kind of stuff I only need occasionally) in a different room, we still only had 1 cupboard to store food in. My collection of different sugars and flours could fill this on their own!

After months of cursing the food cupboard (having to take half the contents out to get something from the back!), I decided something had to be done. I was inspired by Cherry Menlove's kitchen (have a look here) and decided to have some open shelves with glass jars on.

So off I toddled to Ikea and got a load of glass jars of all different sizes and some white shelves. Had to get our local handyman in to put the shelves up as husband is NOT a DIYer, and all of the walls in this house are wonky and extremely difficult to drill into (must be the 250 year old stone that it's built from!).

Then came the issue of labelling the jars, so that I knew which flour was which etc. Here is where Pinterest came in! Oh how I love Pinterest for finding inspiration and ideas. I am slowly following through with some of my pins rather than just endlessly pinning everything!

And here is the result:

It's not the finished article, and will evolve over time, but for now at least it is a huge help. When I bake, I tend to use the worktop right in front of these shelves, so I can now just turn around, grab the ingredient at a glance and get on with my baking, instead of rummaging around in the cupboard endlessly!

The labels were printed using a really cute cross-stitch font that I found on Pinterest (it is the Home Sweet Home font on myfonts) and I found a tutorial (also on Pinterest here) on how to make water decal labels. So onto ebay I went, and got me some water decal paper. They are a bit of a faff to apply, but I got better after a few. I've still got some more to do, but for now, the most used ingredients are all present and correct.

I then moved my attention to the herbs and spices which were cluttering another cupboard. Again on Pinterest (now you see where I spend all my time wilfing!), I saw how someone had used a picture shelf from Ikea as a spice rack.

Ta dah!

These are above the Aga, and so nice and handy when I am cooking.

I used the same font, but this time printed the labels onto shiny sticky paper (another Ebay purchase - is there anything you can't buy on there?).

The kitchen is starting to work a bit better for me.

Just have to get used to the erratic Aga, but I'm sure I'll be posting about that sometime soon...