New kitchen shelves

When we decided to do the big reno, I figured it was a good time to buy the stove that I’ve been lusting after for years. My sister got one first, and I would eye it jealously very time I visited her. It’s a BlueStar six burner gas range. And it’s beautiful. Since the new stove is 36” wide and my old stove was only 30” we had to do some re-jigging of the cabinetry. The old stove was flanked by two 30” uppers and the fridge was against the back wall. It's that ugly black box in the corner there.

With the addition of the upstairs bathroom, we had to create a bulkhead along the top of the upper cabinets, and run a new plumbing stack down in the corner where the fridge used to be. Between this and the new stove, I was worried that we were going to have a tough time with the cabinets, as they were custom made for us 11 years ago. I figured that it would be impossible to match the colour on them. And I really didn’t want to change them.

Thankfully, the sizes of the cabinets worked out perfectly. I searched endlessly, and finally found a Samsung fridge that has French doors, is counter depth, and is only 33” wide. This allowed us to use the old gables and upper to surround the fridge. The contractors had to cut down the upper cabinet about 1.5” as the new fridge is a little taller than the old one.

The next problem was the space between the fridge and the stove. Luckily it was 15” wide, so we cut down the original 30” wide upper and used a single door on it. I ran out to Ikea and picked up a new 15” box for the lower and we used one of the doors from the upper above the stove, and one of the drawer faces from the cabinet we removed. That was our contractor Martin's genius idea.

 

The final hurdle was the space left between the fridge and the original rear wall of the house.

We had a bookshelf built to fill this space, and I painted it the same semi-gloss white as the trim.It looks blindingly white and shiny in the picture, but that's because of the flash. It looks really nice in real life.

The cubbies are three different sizes. The largest one on the bottom is tall enough to fit my original Canadian Living cookbook. I use it all the time, so it was important for it to be in the kitchen. When we were discussing the size of the shelves I had to scurry up to find the cookbook so that we could measure it’s height. I should write to Canadian Living and let them know I designed a bookshelf around their cookbook. Maybe I can win a biggest fan prize or something.

I lugged down all of my favourite cookbooks that I use on a regular basis from their storage place in our bedroom,

pulled out a bunch of pretty kitchen stuff from the cupboards and storage boxes and started arranging the shelves.

And there you have it.

It’s so nice to have all of this extra and easily accessible storage in the kitchen. I can keep a small number of regularly used books from my shamefully large cookbook collection here (I love to read about food almost as much as I love to eat it).

I was worried about losing the two large pot drawers that I kept all of my tupperware in, but I gained some cabinet space that used to be taken up by my cookbooks with this set of shelves. I also ruthlessly purged my storage containers and winnowed it down to one drawer, which I now store to the right of the stove, right below my pots and pans.

Every few days I make a little more progress unpacking. Slow, but steady!