Kitchen Storage Solutions – Cupboard Organizer – Raised Shelves

I don’t know about you lot, but we always seem to run out of space in our kitchen. Everything seems to be nicely in order and then we buy something new and bah no space to store it 😦

Our kitchen furniture is the standard ones; the ones off the “shelf” and not made to measure or to any special order, which means that we didn’t choose the size of our cupboards. They are not so deep but they are tall. In an ideal world I would prefer them to be totally different – or at least not as tall as they are at this moment or maybe just having more shelves inside them, but we do not live in an ideal world so we have to deal with what we have.

But where there is a problem there is also usually a solution to it… we resolved our “problem” of wasting storage space with a range of raised shelves. They simply go inside your cupboard and double your space.

I find this solution brilliant. It is so much easier to reach for things when they aren’t stacking directly one on top of each other. So they offer more storage and ease of use and I love them!

We only use the straight inserts – the ones with just one extra surface but if you look around you will be able to find special stacking shelf racks which look like a step ladder (they might be especially useful for small cupboards filled with things like jars of preserves or spices). There is also a range specially designed for corner cupboards.

But this is not the end of the uses for this lovely little insert. We also use them outside of the cupboards. Mark likes to have his essential cooking things always handy, so they were taking valuable worktop space, but no more… we bought a range of narrow inserts and placed them along the side of the wall. This space wasn’t really used anyway as it is below the upper cupboards so access to this space isn’t all that great. This way we have doubled the storage space we would have without them and I think they look nicer too. On baking days he also tends to dismantle one to use it as a tent frame with a T-towel to cover breads and doughnuts as they are rising!

We even have one for our toaster, so we can hide a sandwich maker below 🙂

There are an infinite number of useful applications when you start to think about it.

Do you use raised shelves in your kitchen?

Do you have any space saving tips you would like to share?