I got busy this weekend, and decided to clean out a few of my kitchen cupboards. I took some pictures for a blog post later this week, and thought you all might be interested as well. I got sick of my old tableware, and ordered new last week, so I decided to finally get rid of everything I was tired of (or that was old/scratched) and make room for new. I also needed to rearrange because I *hate* having to lift salad plates or bowls (or both) off of the dinner plates just to get them out, and I'd gotten to that point where everything was stacked on top of everything else. So I took everything out of my cupboards, and started over.

Here's what my cupboards looked like before. The glasses are okay, but spread out, and the dishes are all stacked on the bottom. My teapots were taking up too much room as well:

And here is the finished reorganized cupboard. I was able to move my brown stemware, apple tableware and three sets of salad/appetizer plates from the dining room cupboard to the kitchen with everything else, and now I have dinner plates on the bottom shelf, salad plates on the middle shelf, and bowls on the top shelf - nothing stacked on top of something different. Plenty of room for the extra stuff I ordered last week (the blank spaces). I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I moved all the teapots to a curio cabinet in my dining room, and pitchers to a different cupboard in the kitchen with room available. I have three boxes of dishes & glasses to take to a second hand store...half of which I just didn't use!

I cleaned out my servingware cupboard in the dining room as well, which was easier after moving all those dishes and stemware into the kitchen where they belong. This is what it looked like before (rather jumbled):

And now everything is organized, with platters on the top shelf, teaware on the next shelf down, and the rest of my bowls and serving pieces organized on the last two shelves, with everything easy to get to without knocking against other things. I entertain quite a bit, so it's important that these pieces are easy to get to, and it's so much more organized now!

Obviously, I'm not a minimalist, as I know many people on this forum prefer, but I actually do use *all* of the things I have, mostly for entertaining with dinner parties and...well...just plain parties. Having things more organized just makes things more efficient, and with respect to the dishes, easier to use on a daily basis since I don't have to "unstack" things and restack as I'm trying to get dinner done or whatever.

I wanted to do my pantry and bakeware cupboards too, but ran out of steam. Those are on the list for another day, I guess! :-)

Anyone else need to clean out thier cupboards?