Improved Kitchen Storage

It's Pinterest Challenge time!!!  

A huge thanks to Katie at BowerPowerBlog, Sherry at Young House Love, Jen at Centsational Girl and Michelle at TenJune Blog for organizing the challenge.  The Pinterest Challenge gets all us bloggers off our buns and DOING some of the great stuff we're pinning!  Find something, Pin It!, do it your spin, and LINK UP!  It's mega huge fun to see what these 4 awesome ladies come up with, not to mention the tons of projects that people share in the link party!

Without further ado - here's what I did:

So our kitchen is bad.  It's so bad that if we had to sell tomorrow we would be totally up a creek.  It's on our list for a full-on gut job sometime in the next 12 months, but until then we can definitely do some things to make it more usable.

A while after we moved in, we picked up this free standing island.

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It's pretty basic - counter space, butcher block top, shelf underneath.  On the shelf we have bins for stuff like onions and potatoes.  And then we just stack our skillets and cookie sheets on the other side.  Now the skillets are not a big problem because there are only 3-4 of them, but the cookie sheets?  A huge pain in the neck. I generally need to get the one on the bottom, which is noisy and annoying.  The solution was a pretty obvious one, as all over Pinterest are vertical solutions for storing baking sheets and/or cutting boards.  Some  were cabinets with vertical dividers and I saw one using tension curtain rods to create vertical dividers within a cabinet.  Someday I'd love to have a nice cabinet for these things, but for now I came up with a solution that will work with what we have.

I was particularly inspired by this pin:

Source: thisoldhouse.com via Ginny on Pinterest

I loved the idea of using shelf brackets as a vertical storage technique and figured that this might work for my cookie sheets.  So on my Ikea trip last week I picked up a few basic shelf brackets.

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Definitely a lot less pretty than the ones in the pin, and why not.  They're about function rather than form and the price was right at $3 apiece.

My plan was to mount these on the lower shelf of the island pointing up creating some vertical separation so that the cookie sheets could be stored vertically.  And that's exactly what I did. Using 1" wood screws and our handy-dandy power drill, I mounted these pointing up on the lower shelf of the island.

I'm going to be totally honest and say that screwing these things in took about a minute and a half.  I almost feel guilty labeling this a "project", but why not.  It's a big improvement, dontcha think?

Ready for the budget breakdown?

• Island - $0 -- already had it
• Brackets - $9 -- $3 each at Ikea
• Screws - $1.20
• GRAND TOTAL - $10.20

So how do you organize your baking sheets?  Vertically?  Have you done any Ikea hacks lately?

Check here for where I've linked up: