Home for Lunch: That Dreadful Drawer

Well, if you didn't know this already.  I have a hate hate relationship with our kitchen.  Nope, no love from me on this one.  


I guess it is because Alan is a much more patient person than I am (he IS a high school teacher - he's pretty patient), but I really really loathe our kitchen.  I probably dislike it more since I spend more time in it.  


Let me give you a quick little list of the things I dislike about our lil 'ol kitchen.  Perfect place to start - it's small and closed in.  We had to build a pantry to house our food, do you remember? There was no where to store food.  Awful.  A cereal box won't even fit properly in our cupboards.  


Oh, right, back to the list.  
It's dark.
The oven is too small for the cookie sheets we own. - ha, that one makes me laugh every single time.
The drawers don't work. (well, the hubs fixed one of them)
There are at least two whole cabinets that are not even functional (ie. they are too small to put anything in)  I mean, really?  Who builds a kitchen like this? 
I can't reach half of the cabinets - but, I guess that's not really the kitchen's fault.
The countertops are faux wood grain and the corners don't even match up (they are so uneven that we can't put anything over the threshold because it won't sit level.  Which can make for some interesting cutting board action).   
It's dirty, and will probably never be totally clean, as hard as I try. 


I could really go on all night.  But, I will spare you every single detail.  


Just know, I loathe it.  Very much. Very very much.  However, until we have saved up the enormous amount of money it takes to tear out a kitchen and start over, we have to live with it.  


So, in an effort to find more function in this little functionless thing in our house that we call a kitchen I got started on a few little projects today.  


The first one, cleaning out this drawer, that doesn't get used, since it doesn't work.  Yep, there's no track for the little wheels to run on.  Well, there is, but it's really hard to open.  So, instead of opening it all the time, we just shove it full of stuff.  See.

Mostly what makes it into the drawer are take out napkins (for what reason, I'm not sure, we don't eat that much take out), owners manuals to whatever gadgets we purchase, funnels, matches.  Well, here are most of the treasures recovered from the drawer. Pretty much completely random things. 

There were some useful things and even some coupons for free food! Score!

I only had time to clean out during lunch today (let me rephrase that, Wal-Mart didn't have what I needed - I don't know why I even shop there, ours is awful), so on my way home I stopped by Lowe's and picked up a utensil tray to make our old junk drawer more useful.  After filling it up, it's now much easier to find what we're looking for, without having to move everything out of the way first. 

Here's what our main utensil drawer looked like before. Piles and piles of things.  Just a mess.

Now, it's looking much better.

Since we use this drawer daily, it's the only one that has been upgraded with a new track.  Let's just say, this is a total function over form thing. It looks horrible, along with the rest of the kitchen (so it fits right in), but man does it work good.  Smooth as silk. The other drawers will be getting new tracks this weekend.  Now, we will just have to figure out how to make them work on the trickier other two drawers. 

Next up, find out how I fixed my spice problem. Another drawer and a few more things from Lowes.