We have lived in our current rental property for nearly 5 years now. Every day is a battle to keep this place clean, as it is SSOO small. We only ever eat meals at a dining table when we go out to eat (very rare these days), or when we visit Em’s parents together, or when I get out to Oz to see my family. We just don’t have the room for any sort of dining table, which I hate. I hate eating, sitting in front of the TV.
There IS storage space in the house, but it’s modest, and it’s taken us a long time to downsize our stuff that used to fit quite nicely into a two-bedroom house, to a one-bedroom place. And Em is the BIGGEST hoarder ever!!! I came over just with clothes – so I haven’t really hoarded anything. All my other stuff is still at mums.
Anyway, with a walk-in robe that couldn’t house anything beyond clothes, an under-stair storage space that has been full of stuff virtually since we moved in, a shed that is 3 quarters full (it can never be fully filled due to the gas and electricity meters being in there!) and a kitchen with the most diabolical cupboard space you’ve ever seen, something HAD to be done with our unsightly mess!!
A few weeks into the New Year we decided to utilise the whole wardrobe for storage of everything minus clothes, and bought 2 free-standing canvas covered wardrobes for our clothes. That freed up a LOT of space.
The next thing we needed was some kind of storage space for the kitchen. I thought if we could get some kind of free-standing cupboard to put in the kitchen we could use it as a larder/pantry for our foodstuff and store all our kitchen cookware away in the daft cupboard space in the kitchen. We had no way of storing our cookware away properly, so there were always sauce pans and frying pans sitting on the stove top and we used to have to put all our cooking trays and the like into the oven to keep them hidden away. There was no room for a toaster, and other things like our liquidiser and multi-cooker had to be on full display as there was just NOWHERE to put them.
Anyway, cutting it short, nearly 2 weeks back we got ourselves a cupboard for the kitchen. A self-assembly job, which was scaring the pants off us. But we actually managed to put it together!!
It was meant to have a draw at the top. And we did assemble the draw. But because the unit isn’t fully flush together and is a bit “gappy” (IE: not cleanly connected), the draw doesn’t slide flush on the anchors inside, so we’ve ditched the use of the draw and are just using the space to store the condiments and stuff. It stores all of our non-chill/frozen foodstuff and it cleared all the existing kitchen cupboard space we were using for the food so we can now store away all our cookware! The best £29.00 we’ve ever spent (apart from the £22.00 we spent getting our dishwasher).
The kitchen is finally clean and tidy. Yay!!!