DIY: Kitchen Shelves

I’m continuing the process of making my house feel like a home and that means not only adding things that I find pretty, it means creating storage space for my life. One of the areas that was particularly crowed was the breakfast nook of my kitchen. It was time for an update to make a little more space since often you can find me, Ryli (my roommate) and our two dogs all in the kitchen together. Sometimes it would get just a little overcrowded. Here’s a little layout of my kitchen nook.

As you can tell the whole nook has a lot going on from dog beds and food bowls to the rack that held a microwave once upon a time and now collects junk. You see in my old college apartment I had very little space so I bought that little bakers rack to store some thing but at this house it is just in the way and takes up far to much floor space. Then there’s my huge white trashcan that was set there when we moved in and seemed to just stay. I hate seeing trash cans. So lets take a look of the space before.

So as you can tell I have this wire and wood rack that clearly does not do much for me other than hold a few cookbooks and random decorations and otherwise just take up precious floor space. In front of that lovely little rack is a dog zone complete with a purple place mat and two bowls (our babies love each other so much that they share food). Then there’s a lovely view of a (sometimes) white trash can. Can you say ick? So I began by clearing out all of this stuff and finding more suitable homes for the objects that were so offensive to me.

So I cleared everything out and then broke out my tools and supplies of choice. Yay for power tools! (Power drill not pictured, bad blogger!)

I bought two wooden shelves from my most recent trip to IKEA that came with brackets and screws. I needed a power screwdriver, a yard stick, molly bolts, a level and some extra screws. I put the brackets on the shelves first and the cool things about these particular shelves is their brackets could be installed two ways, either on top of the shelf or on the bottom of the shelf, I went with putting them on top. That way it would be almost like I had bookends built in.

Then I chose the height I wanted for my shelves by making a level mark for the screws. I drilled the holes for the screws and remeasured to make sure I had everything even and level. Then to give the shelves extra support I used what my mother has always referred to as Molly Bolts. Is that the correct terminology? I have no idea but if you’re not familiar with my family’s concept of a molly bolt it’s basically a big white reinforcement screw that goes into the wall before the actual screw. It’s great if you’re drilling into drywall.

Then it was just a matter of lining the brackets up with the holes I made and twisting in the screws. Here they are in all their naked wood glory.

Here a shot of the front action.

I failed to mention that while creating floor space was my number one reason for tackling my little shelf project, the second reason was to have a visible place for my cookbooks to sit. I’m hoping by having my cookbooks right in front of my face I’ll be more encouraged to you know, actually USE them?

Ahh I wish you could walk though and see how much space this has freed up in my nook. I’ve since moved the rack into the closet under the stairs for storage of things I use very seldom and moved my trashcan into my pantry so it’s now hidden away. Good riddance, it was a major eye sore to me. The dog bowls are actually back next to the fridge because there really is not another place for them. I’m sure that the items on the shelves are going to be a work in progress and I’ll continue rotating them out with possible dishes I like but for now I can breathe a sigh of relief.