How to Create More Kitchen Storage Without Remodeling

Create more kitchen storage without remodeling or spending a lot of money.
The doors on your kitchen cabinets can be more than swinging slabs that hide cabinet junk.
Here’s how.

 

Are you an Ikea shopper?

I love roaming every aisle in the huge stores, but especially where the kitchen organizer ideas are sold.

Do the Danish have extra small kitchens, that they need such innovative ways to stretch space?

Maybe they cook a lot and have a lot of items to store.

For whatever reason, Ikea has Variera; Maximera; Smacker with an umlaut that makes it sound like the German word for lovely, Passup; and more brands than you could ever pronounce. All with items to create storage.

Sigh.

I want to go to Ikea right now.

 

But this post is about

How to create Kitchen storage without remodeling

or buying out a 10 acre store.

This is about up-cycling and recycling items for free or practically free

and getting your cabinet doors to become more.

(I’m sorry, cabinet doors. Your days of just swinging back and forth covering up messy cabinets are over. You are going to have a makeover. Because that’s what conscientious bloggers do. They can’t leave anything alone.)

 

 

1. Cut a plastic storage bin in half, or to the size you need, and screw to a cabinet door inside. Instant storage.
2. Buy a couple of small whiteboards from the Dollar Store. Attach to the inside of a cabinet door for an instant message center. This door has a piece of metal attached above, handy to hold a magnetic holder for a dry erase pen. And the magnets that you used to have on the fridge. Because fridge doors these days have become too classy to hold magnets. At least our 2018 model doesn’t magnet. The sides do, but not the doors. So there is no place for the pictures my grandlittles bring weekly. 🙁  Now I can leave the cabinet door open, all casually, and they will see that their art is properly displayed.
3. A 2 liter soda bottle! Cut off the bottom and most of the neck, attach to the back of a cabinet door, and voila! A place for the grocery sacks that multiply like mosquitoes in the neighbor’s pasture after it’s been flood irrigated.
4. Go to the barn/garage and steal a piece of your husband’s tool-hanger panel. If it’s already attached to the wall, you could use the Saws-All and cut off a corner where he won’t notice. Then swipe some hooks while you’re at it, and create this fantastic all-purpose hanger for all things. On the back of a kitchen cabinet door!

 

Yep, these doors are becoming more and more!

 

 

 

1. Apparently you can buy clip strips for spice jars that attach to cabinet doors. Who knew. They come in a white 4 piece set – 2 strips for 4 larger jars, and 2 strips for 5 smaller jars. You can order them here on Amazon.
2. This is my favorite idea of all, from the blog Tidbits From the Tremaynes. She painted black chalkboard paint on the cabinet door inside, then added strips of trim. She used cup hooks screwed into the trim to hold her measuring cups. I hope she doesn’t mind, but I think I would swap the cup hooks for this style of hooks, so I can hang all three of my measuring cup sets up. Also, the black paint might get dinged up with the cups banging the door when it swings open and shut. The cups could clang pretty good, too, so I might glue black felt behind the cup part. Would you hang measuring cups on a door, or would the noise bother you?
3. This whole cabinet is an organizer’s Marie Kondo dream. I was especially noticing the spice boxes on the left door. I think this blogger DIYed them, but it doesn’t look too hard for anyone to imitate.
4. And this lid keeper is also ingenious. She used command hooks to hang a magazine rack on the cabinet door. Since plastic lids aren’t super heavy this should hold up well. If you have something heavier to store, you could screw a trim piece to the door back, then screw the magazine rack to that. (Without the trim the door might not be thick enough to grip the screws securely. And, I don’t think your family would care to have screw tips poking out the cabinet doors.)

 

Do you have innovative ways to make your cabinet doors work harder?
We’d love to hear how you create more kitchen storage.

Until next time,

Love, Kim & Dorothy