Maximizing Space in the Kitchen

Our kitchen is teeny tiny, which I'm sure that you've noticed in the pictures.  So, we have gotten a little creative (but not really) in order to maximize our space.  So, some things you could do if you're in the same boat as us...

1.  Put your microwave over the oven.  This required us to shorten the cabinets above the oven, but who cares?  I can hardly reach them anyway!  Although we probably could have done this ourselves, we didn't have much time, so we paid a friend to do it.  He did an excellent job, and now we have more counter space!  Yippee!

2.  Put a basket/vase on the counter with frequently used utensils.  It looks cute and it's handy for cooking!

3.  Hang stuff on the inside of your cabinet doors.  Seriously, we have something hanging on almost all of them.  It provides easy access AND creates more space.  See above and below.

4.  Canisters - they're pretty and handy for storage.

5.  Put up a cork board on the inside of the cabinet to "pin" coupons, reciepts, recipes, etc.  Ours mostly has Zaxby's coupons from the back of our grocery reciepts.  (We go there with the youth group most Wednesday nights).  This gets rid of some clutter by creating a place to put little slips of paper.

6.  Use a pantry!  We had a coat closet near our kitchen, but we didn't have a pantry.  We turned the closet into a pantry for some food storage and a lot of kitchen storage.  Parker built the shelves and it is AWESOME storage for us!

How do you maximize your kitchen space?