Making The Most With A Small Kitchen

Not every homeowner can be graced with a big beautiful kitchen with a lot of space and storage. Some of you have to deal with what you have and make the best of it. If you have a smaller kitchen and you want some ideas on making the best of a small kitchen, consider checking out some of the tips and advice below, as well as a few kitchen hacks to help you stay organized.

Pegboards and Hangers Are Always A Plus

Pegboards (those particle wood boards with the holes in them) are really quite useful in a smaller kitchen. They allow you to use your cabinet and drawer space for other utensils and tools in the kitchen and they can add a certain focus point. You can paint these pegboards any color you want and then use metal hangers to stick into the little holes and hang things like pots and pans, strainers, cutting boards and more.

You can also place a wooden board with a magnet on the back of it (to magnetize the board) and use the board as a place to hang your knives. It's a really cool conversation piece but it doesn’t take away any space, perfect for a smaller kitchen. Likewise, if you don’t like the pegboard look, you can still use a magnetic strip with a flat metal bar to place your knives, kitchen shears and other metal tools on.

This has a really cool look and sometime better than usual kitchen cabinets. In your new kitchen idea you can design for a bathroom towel bar by placing it under a shelf in your kitchen whether it's standard kitchen or gourmet kitchen. Then you can get some large pottery bowls and place forks, knives and spoons inside the bowls and hang those from the towel bar instead of getting cheap kitchen cabinets with doors that are not going to look pretty.

Additional Storage Within Storage

This is an ingenious little idea. It allows you to use the shelves inside your cabinets for things like plates, but then they also use these metal sort of baskets to attach to the underneath part of the shelves.

This way, instead of having 3 shelves, you can have 6 shelves. These can be bought at any home improvement store and they are really easy to install. Here’s a little image so you can see what they look like:

                

Add A Shelf Over Your Cupboards

If you have a cabinet that has space above, before it reaches the ceiling and it’s a lot of space you can consider this wasted space.

You can actually purchase a board the length of the cabinet and anchor it to the wall above the cabinet, between the cabinet and the ceiling. Simply use some sandpaper to sand it down and make it smooth, put a primer over it and some paint and use an anchoring system to anchor it to the wall in your kitchen. Then you have two rather large additional spaces to put things like mason jars filled with dried goods, wicker baskets for cookbooks or other things that you don’t use on an everyday or every week basis but you still want them in the kitchen. You can also place things like cake stands, pans, and large bowls that you want to keep but don’t use a whole lot up on these shelves.

Vertical Holders

These are really cool. This is actually a magazine holder in mesh metal. It can be screwed into your pantry door or wall in the kitchen and it's a great place to keep things like saran wrap, wax paper, foil and even cheesecloth. It stays organized but it also stays out of the way space wise and visual wise - so you don’t have these ugly red, yellow and blue oblong boxes just hanging around on your kitchen countertops.

Add A Foldable Table

This is awesome! This is a table that is a semi-circle. It can be mounted right to the side of a wall, has about a 4-5 inch shelf and then a foldable table top. When not in use, just adjust the metal tab under the table and it will unfold and lay downwards. These are easy to use, really cute, and they’re space efficient.

Build Upwards Not Outwards

Chances are if you have a smaller kitchen you still have a higher ceiling. Think of all that wasted space you could be using! One good way to take advantage of this is to use metal or wooden shelves and anchor them to the wall. Perhaps you have a good bit of wall space by the stove or the fridge. This is a good place to add the shelves and you can place all sorts of items on them.

These are all fantastic ideas if you rent and have a smaller kitchen or you want to try and save up for a bigger budget if you own your home and want to do a renovation or remodel down the line.