Back in the good ol days, they had what was called a broom closet. It is actually one of my favorite features of my home. We use it for all sorts of storage in our kitchen.
It sits right next to the basement stairs and our breeze way. It's not a walk-in closet, but provides lots of room for our recycling, cooking books, and food storage.
The recycling stuff. Here is where it use to end up.
Yep, on the counter, in a pile. Usually, our counter space is over flowing with items to take out to the recycle bin. Yes, we are that lazy. I mean, we have to walk through the breeze way, press the garage door opener, unlock the door, THEN put it in the bin. What a hassle!
Our bottle returns usually ended up where ever there was room in the closet. When we opened the door to the closet, usually one or two bottles end up falling out and rolling down the basement stairs.
The Solution!
I found these babies at Crate and Barrel for about $9 a piece (the smaller ones)!
Now our broom closet looks like this....
Recycling on top, bottles on the bottom.
Food Storage. With only one cabinet to hold snacks, we needed another place to store ingredients, such as flour, brown sugar, tea, etc.
These handy containers from Crate and Barrel are great! The only compliant I have about them is the lids are hard to clean. Other than that, I love them! The best part is being able to stack them.
We also house any plastic bags that we collect in this handy holder from Bed Bath and Beyond.
In our home, this does not stay full for very long from all the dog pooh.
On the hook, where a broom should go, we hang our flash light, in case of a power outage. You may ask why we do not have a broom in our kitchen. Remember, it's the world's tiniest kitchen. It is very hard to swept with a broom in there. So I generally run a hand held vacuum in there. Much easier and less mess.
I hope my tips were of use to you.
Tell me how you handle your small spaces!
Tell me how you handle your small spaces!
12 comments:
Great ideas, we really need to get into recycling!
Those containers are awesome... I think MI recycling is such a pain, but it looks like you've got a good sorting system going on! :) (and I like that the inside of your closet is painted pretty!)
We have that exact same closet in the exact same place of our house....good ol Michigan bungalows!
I use it as my pantry. All of my noodles, canned goods, etc are in there. My shelves look a little deeper than yours. But its not nearly as organized!
Sigh. Our broom closet is our pantry--oh how I would love to turn it back into a broom closet.
What really helped us with getting our recycling under control is signing up for Recycle Bank (recyclebank.com if you want to see if it's available in your area) through Waste Management--they use single stream recycling so you no longer have to sort! Plus it frees up so much space since you can put the recyclables in a bin that they provide and pick up curbside twice a month. Can you tell I love them?! In our city, we had to drive to a recycling drop off center, so anything to make recycling easier earns big bonus points in my book!
Hey Brick Cottage Lady! - We actually have a once a week service through our city that comes to pick up our recycling. It's wonderful! We just dump everything in there and they take it away! I have noticed at times, we could use two bins.
When I first saw that picture of your dogs I was like "omg did they have a cow in their house?!?" Obviously, it's the end of the week and I'm starting to lose my mind ;)
Awesome solution for a small space! I especially love the bag holder thing, we could really use one of those.
I would kill for any kind of closet space near our kitchen. We don't have a pantry or small broom closet, and I think I would kill for one at this point...
hahah..Kate...His name is Fatty and we actually call him our little cow. I wanted to put utters on him for Halloween, but Clint stopped me because he is a boy.
We always have a similar pile of recycing on our kitchen counter, too even though I have a basket under the kitchen sink to stash everything in before we sort it in the garage (we don't have curbside :( ). How lazy am I! ;)
Excellent solutions - I've been eyeing those containers in the C&B catalog...might need to get some now.
Honey, my entire apartment is a small space ;)
JEGs and i have the same air tight canisters-- we recieved them as housewarming gifts when we moved into Falconhead. We loved them so much that we registered for an entire collection!
We have yet to break into the new collection, but I love using them for cereal storage!
LB
love your container storage, I really want those! Wish I had a pantry -- our house us teeny tiny, so I try my best to keep things organized and buy helpers like you have, makes life much easier
Mmm - delicious organization! We have an old trash compactor that doesn't work, we use it for our recycling until we can finally redo the kitchen!
Awesome! I wish we had a broom closet in our kitchen. Or anywhere, for that matter. The closest closet to the kitchen is my cedar closet, which does house dog food and plastic bags, but I refuse to give up anymore of my clothes storage!
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