I pinned it & did it {kitchen drawers}

Jen, over at Iheart organizing is working on her kitchen this month, and has motivated us to to do the same! She recently had a guest blogger share her beautiful kitchen, including these lovely drawers:

 {source}

and Jen's own lovely drawers

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more organized drawers

 and  I absolutely love these dishes in a drawer with pretty labels!

So, I already mentioned that I made a trip to WalMart and the Dollar Tree in preparation for this project, here. I snagged a few supplies randomly, since I really wasn't sure how any of this was going to work out.

Dollar Tree goodies

Shelf paper from WalMart

I picked the "prettiest" shelf paper that I could find at my WalMart store. This is really a bit more pink and girly than what I wanted, but it will still look nice in my drawers.

I measured the bottoms of my drawers and precut my paper to fit the width. I considered going the other direction, but there was only a tiny bit of space left uncovered in the back, so I went this way to save on wasting a bunch.

I reeeeeaally really wanted to buy a clear acrylic divider for my silverwear so that you could really see the pretty paper through it, but since they aren't at the Dollar Tree, it wasn't in the budget. I may have pouted a bit about that one.

Here's what each of the drawers looked like when I started. Eww right?

No words for this drawer, you just dig until you find what you are looking for.

 
The silverwear drawer actually wasn't too bad. Everything was properly contained in its basket/divider.
       

Empty baskets= less than useful



Also no words for this drawer. Vitamin packs are taking over!!!

So I emptied out every drawer and piled everything on to the counter. I forgot to snap a picture of this step. I took a timeout in the middle to go to work for a few hours, which meant leaving my kitchen with empty drawers and counters piled full. If someone had walked in, they would have thought a crazy person lives there. But then again, maybe one does? But I digress,
I wiped out each drawer with an antibacterial wipe and let them air dry. Since we live in an apartment, I didn't want to actually stick down the shelf paper only to have to rip it back up when we leave. So I went a little redneck and used tape to stick down the edges, while leaving the backing on.

 My drawers now all looked like this:

I played around with a few arrangements before settling on the final layouts for my drawers. I really tried hard to find a long basket or tray to hold the cooking utensils, but came up empty handed for now.

The clear tray on the left is actually a party serving tray, but will hold clips and whatever else I decide to stash in there nicely. I do have more clips, but they are all presently in use. The white wire basket holding the pizza cutter also came from the Dollar Tree. I tried to fit the apple slicer in there too, but no such luck. The strainer tucks nicely into the back of the drawer.

The utensil drawer is looking much better! Even though everything is not in nice baskets like I wanted, it is still more functional than it was before. The black tray moved over from the other drawer to house the few things that would fit. The potato masher got kicked out of this drawer because it always got stuck when you opened the drawer all the way.

Not much changed in this drawer. The vitamin packs got corralled into baskets from the dollar tree and the measuring cups found a new home next to the food scale.

And finally the silver wear drawer gets a little pop of color, and the addition of the potato masher, since this drawer is not usually opened completely, it stashes away safely in the back.

On my Dollar Tree trip, I also grabbed this four pack of clear bowls, thinking I could use them in one of the drawers. But nothing really fit nicely into them. So I popped two of them into the cupboard that also recently got a makeover. (read about that here)

I popped a few packs of gum into one and the loose cough drops into another. We have been popping a lot of these lately, so being able to grab one easily is nice right now. I'm sure I will find a use for the two extra bowls somewhere....

I am loving the pretty pop of color every time I open a drawer now! What have you done to brighten up or organize your kitchen? Are you participating in Jen's kitchen challenge this month?