About this time last year, we installed a small rack in an awkward, unused corner of the kitchen to form a tea & coffee station.

It has been working quite well, but it still meant I had to go to various drawers, shelves and cupboards for some of the essentials like teaspoons, mugs and sugar. Actually, the term ’station’ was probably a bit of an overstatement now that I think about it.

I didn’t want all these little things cluttering up the kitchen benchtop and having to move them to wipe up every day. What I needed was a tray (“You’ll need a tray!”).

Turns out I had the perfect thing already under my nose, in the form of this adorable strawberry crate that I bought for this shoot. There’s lots of red and a bit of green in the kitchen already, plus I’ve been wanting to add some natural textures to soften the stark whiteness so it couldn’t have worked out better!

I already had the mason jar, sugar dish, milk jug, mugs and hooks (the latter I borrowed from the spice rack) so it was a totally free project. Gotta love that!

We only use the milk jug and sugar for guests now (I’ve succeeded in one of my 2013 goals to eliminate sugar from my coffee – go me!) but I still wanted to have that all in the same place too. When we entertain I can now just remove the kettle, add some teacups and take the whole tray into the lounge.

I love how streamlined the process is now. Sure, it only saves a few seconds, but instead of needlessly fussing about getting out my coffee making things, I can do something more useful like put away last night’s clean dishes or open some mail.

The only thing I haven’t managed to find a solution for is the teabags. They’re currently in a divided box in the pantry – it’s too large to fit here as is, and I quite like how it separates the flavours so I’m not sure what I will do about that yet.

Tell us: how do you store your hot drink essentials? Convenient and out in the open or neatly tucked out of sight?

This strawberry sauce recipe is really easy, I challenge you to screw it up. It’s super tasty on pancakes or ice-cream. Perfect for Valentine’s Day, no?

Find my recipe and the free printable labels over on Polka Dot Bride today.

We’ve had this little basket in the washstand in the living room to corral all our vouchers (coupons) and gift cards. It needed a good cleanout anyway (why were there piles of business cards and expired ID/membership cards in there??) and I decided to take the opportunity to somewhere we’d be more likely to remember to check before heading out shopping or ordering a pizza.

I picked up this cute magnetic box for $2 at a random Japanese bargain store in the market district (seriously they had the best stuff! I could have gone nutso on the cute storage on beautiful glazed stone and bamboo tableware).

Turns out it was the perfect way to keep our vouchers neat and tidy. I put it on the side of the fridge so it’s out-of-the-way but still easily accessible.

I should point out that here in Australia there’s no such thing as ‘couponing’ – the supermarket price is the supermarket price. It was a foreign concept to me until I started reading US blogs. So thankfully we don’t have a zillion vouchers to cut out, store, use and keep an eye on the expiry so there’s no need for a complicated category system. We only have the occasional pizza flyer (which we rarely use) and a handful of gift cards from birthdays. (Which reminds me, time to go shopping for free!)

How do you organise your vouchers/coupons and gift cards?

Firstly, apologies for the dreadful photography in this post. Taking shots of the inside of cupboards is not easy!

Moving on. Let’s talk kitchen storage.

We have these cavernous lower cupboards in three corners of our kitchen. They might be large but they are so awkward to use, especially this one because the adjacent fridge sticks out.

Looking at this ‘before’ is probably enough and I don’t need to explain why a makeover was required. However, I will point out a couple of functionality issues we were having.

• The serving platters were all stacked on top of each other so it was difficult to pull out and replace the item you needed (there are more of them underneath the shelf riser on the left).
• Some frequently used items (such as the Pyrex dishes) were at the back while the once-in-a-blue-moon food processor attachments took up prime position.
• There was no real system of placement so the everyday prep items were mixed in with the servingware.

One day I’d had enough and pulled everything out and started over and it now looks like this:

Ah, so much better right? (And not just because of the improved photo quality.)

I separated it out so that the top shelf is all for food prep and the lower shelf is all related to serving.

The enormous array of ridiculously specific food processor attachments remain out of the way for one day when I have a sudden urge to make Russian dumplings.

Another change that made a huge difference was the addition of a couple more wire shelf risers (I bought mine from Howard’s Storage World but you find them in plenty of places). It is a much better use of the space and avoids too much stacking so things are far easier to access. (There are a couple of items which you may spot are missing, these have either been gotten rid of or relocated to elsewhere in the kitchen.)

The stacking of platters was particularly inconvenient and it also didn’t allow for a variety of sizes. I picked up a stainless steel pot lid rack from Ikea and it is the perfect way to organise my platters. I thought they might be too heavy and push it out but it works great! It’s so much easier to access and put away.

Oh and in case you were wondering, I think I’m all set for white platters for the time being.

Shelf Genie via Organizing Made Fun

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve come home from the shopping with another bottle of soy sauce or packet of cashews because I forgot about the spare one I already had in the depths of the pantry. Sadly I can’t fit this kind of setup in my pantry in an awkward corner base cabinet, but if you have a full-length pantry I reckon you’ll love these retrofitted drawers to solve all your forgotten food woes.

Family Handyman

Hands up who could do with some more storage in the kitchen? Yep, me too.

These fantastic drawers installed into the usually wasted toe-kick space have to be one of the cleverest ways I’ve seen to cheat more storage. They’re perfect for those awkward large items such as baking trays and best of all, they can be retrofit into your existing cabinetry.

Here’s the tutorial if you’re game to DIY it, otherwise ask a kitchen company or your local cabinetmaker.

I mentioned some time ago in this post that I wanted to upgrade our dodgy plastic kitchen taps. Well I am pleased to announce that we have finally ticked it off!

To refresh your memory, here’s what it looked like before:

The tiles in the kitchen and laundry are painted, which had been problem-free until we realised that the baseplates for the new taps were smaller than the old ones. So we had to leave the water turned off (during a very hot weekend) until I’d touched up the gap.

Here they are now, all shiny and new:

The taps in the laundry didn’t look quite as bad as in the kitchen, but there was this little problem when the tap was running:

Yep, every time we used the laundry taps, we got a waterfall of wasted water coming out of the wall. Not cool.

We had the same ring-of-stripy tiles issue as in the kitchen, so after repainting that we thought we were smooth sailing home. Except that the new taps had a shorter thread than the old ones so we couldn’t screw them in. Gah! After an emergency trip to the hardware store to buy tap extenders, they look like this:

If you’re interested in replacing your own taps, I found some useful how-tos on YouTube.

I love how they look so much more crisp and clean, as well as being more functional. Not to mention crossing a long-standing job off your to-do list being so satisfying!