Decorating for Christmas and other holidays can involve so much stuff! Sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming to pack up and store all of those holiday decorations. How can you lighten your burden? Look for opportunities to multipurpose your decorations so that they are …
Unless you live in a nudist colony, clothes are an essential part of your everyday life. Most people have a closet jam packed with clothes, shoes and accessories and find themselves wishing for more closet space. Most people are also drowning in a sea of …
Now that I have my patio furniture project completed, I am moving on to some quicker spring cleaning/design projects in the home. The first project I have in mind is countertops, clearing them bare — particularly in the kitchen and bath.
Good design is not only beautiful but functional as well. Open up any picture in a magazine of a showcase home and what will strike you about the kitchens and bathrooms is that the counters are completely bare! Take these examples:
Why are we so obsessed with minimalist countertops? There is something about flat, open space that appeals to all of us. Clean countertops give us subliminal messages about opportunity. “Hey, gather up the kids and make some cookies, there’s plenty of room here!” “Go ahead, try out that new makeup routine!” “There’s plenty of space to think here. Spread out that project!” Clear countertops are also a great visual trick to make us think the room is large enough (or has enough storage) that there is no need to put anything on the countertop.
There is also a functional aspect to minimalist countertops as well. It is far easier and faster to clean a countertop with nothing on it! Lifting and moving objects to clean underneath takes a surprising amount of time. Also, if the countertop is messy, chances are you have spatters on the objects that were on the counter as well, so you spend time cleaning those items too.
Is it possible for us mere mortals to live like the fictional, completely elegant people in these designs? I challenge you to find out. For the next several days, try clearing as much off of your countertops as you can. Take things out of the kitchen and bathroom that don’t belong there and store or dispose of them. Remove duplicates, broken items and things that just don’t seem to get used. Remove at least one item that you are convinced always has to stay out on the countertop and store it somewhere else. With what’s left, think creatively about how you might get down to a completely clear (or almost completely clear) countertop.
For inspiration, I have provided some examples below of creative storage options for the most common countertop items.
In our home, we solved the paper towel roll “problem” by not using paper towels. We have a bunch of rags we store in a kitchen drawer that we wash and reuse. Dirty rags go in a basket near the trash.
We started using the top rack of the dishwasher as our dish drainer and eliminated the need for a dish drainer on the countertop. We also have almost no items in our kitchen that must be hand washed (thank goodness!).
A knife block is certainly convenient and keeps your knives ready to use when you need them. If you aren’t doing a lot of cooking, however, the knife block is probably just in your way.
If you are lucky, you might have a special cabinet drawer for knife storage that you could transfer the knives too.
In our discussion of design this week, we started with one of the most traditional styles, Colonial style, and then discussed one of the most feminine and ornate styles, Victorian style. To round out the discussion, today we will cover contemporary style. Contemporary style refers …