Make It Work: Living Room Storage

Thank you all so much for your sweet words and kind wishes last Monday! We have had a fun week of celebrating our engagement and getting the wedding plans off the ground. For a list lover, wedding planning is exhilarating! Anyway, I could go on and on about my strange adoration to lists, but I will save that for another day and, instead, get down to business.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the addition of the full wall of open shelving in the kitchen was a huge game-changer for the apartment. Not only did it roughly triple the amount of storage space and make the cooking process even more enjoyable, but it also caused us to slightly rearrange the kitchen (move the table towards the door) and, therefore, no longer have room for the little makeshift storage shelf that used to hand out along that wall. Forgive the old, ugly picture, but it is the only one I have with the shelf. I actively avoided taking pictures of this wall, because, as you can see, the shelf wasn’t doing the space any favors (though we were in no position to turn down any bit of storage before!).The new arrangement in the kitchen freed up the shelf to be used for other things. Is it the prettiest shelf in the world? No. Does it hold stuff and prevent piles of junk on the floor? Yes. This is Make It Work, people. Sometimes we can’t be picky. So we decided to take advantage of the (free!) small shelf for the nook in the living room next to the heater. This area used to have a chair, but we hardly ever used it (once again, apologies for the old pic).We decided it was better use of the space to replace the chair with the small shelf to hold the overflow of our record and book collections. Since we can always grab the chair from the garage if guests are coming over, ditching the chair wasn’t a big deal to us. In fact, having it gone makes the space feel so much bigger!

In addition to gaining some much-needed storage space for our media collections, I also managed to find a place for that gorgeous set of iron keys I got in wine country. Following your suggestions, I decided to gather all of my other keys from around the house and cluster them together to form a “key wall” (more like a key area). The newest addition to the key family is one of my favorites. When my Uncle Rick passed away, my dad found this key in his belongings and immediately thought of me. Whenever I look at it, I think of my uncle. It’s a nice little thing to remember him by.

Once again, a seemingly simple addition of storage has made our living room so much more organized and functional. We no longer have stacks of rogue records hanging around, and my keys finally have a home! The space is cleaner and more open… mission accomplished. For free. BOOM.