Operation {Re}Organization: Kitchen Cabinets Part 3 {The Details}

I hope y'all have enjoyed the inside look (literally) at my kitchen cabinets this week. (See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.) I've still got a couple of areas to tackle including the deep, dark recesses of my under-the-sink corner cabinet, but I need to grab a couple of items to help it function better so that may take a little while longer to do :).

Today we're zooming in on some details of this project. These are the little things that I hope will keep this space organized and more functional than it was before. Let's start with a little project I previewed yesterday - something I'm calling my cheap frugal version of the pull-out cabinet drawer. Like I mentioned yesterday, we're renters, so I'm not about to invest in expensive additions to a kitchen that's not ours. I used a little creative, outside-of-the-box thinking to come up with something that functions similarly to those cabinet drawers.

Take a look...

It's basically a movable shelf liner with a little tab on the end I can pull out to reach the contents in the back of the cabinet.

Here's how I made it:

I started with some old, heavy-duty laminated place mats I had been holding onto, but don't use anymore because they have my old monogram on them.

When I placed two place mats next to each other, they pretty much matched the depth of my cabinets exactly (score!).

So I grabbed some clear packing tape and taped them together along the long edge. I put a piece of tape on each side of the place mats so the joint wouldn't flex too much.

And that's it. So simple, yet so perfect for what I needed!

To go the extra mile and make them easy to use, I took a short piece of packing tape and a little washi tape to add a pull tab so that I could easily pull the place mats out from the shelf and grab the contents in the back.

(You can ignore the dings and scratches on the table - comes with the territory of being an old farm table!)

To make the tab, I tore off a piece of packing tape about 4 inches long, folded a portion of it over and put the sticky sides together leaving an inch of the sticky side exposed so I could stick it to the underside of the place mat. Does that make sense? Sorry, that's a lot of the word "sticky" in one sentence. I finished it off with a piece of pretty blue washi tape on the edge that sticks out and wrote "pull" on it with a pink sharpie. Yep, sometimes you need to be explicit with instructions.

Since they're laminated and stiff, they slide in and out easily, which helps me reach contents in the back of the cabinet.

So far they've worked really well! I made three of these movable shelf liners total, and put them in the cabinet under the pots and pans and baking pans/casserole dishes.

There are a couple of other helpful organizational items in this cabinet including an old drying rack that I repurposed to hold pot lids and smaller wooden cutting boards (right side of the top shelf), and a magazine file to corral my Silpat baking sheet liners. You can also see that I added some washi tape labels to the doors so that you can see what's on each shelf at a glance without getting down on the floor to see what's in the back area of each shelf. It's the little things, right? :)

For the lazy susan cabinet, I actually made a list of the contents on each tier, as well as a list of all the items on the floor of the cabinet. This ensures that everything goes back in its designated spot and we don't end up with a mish mash of stuff piled all over that annoying thing.

Maybe I'll type up these lists someday to make them prettier. Maybe. (That's what I call a very low priority item though!)

I think that'll about do it for the details on this project. Did I miss anything you were curious about?

Hope y'all have a great day!

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