Jumping on the Bandwagon.

First real post since my holiday hiatus and I want to share something real special with you for our 2014 reunion.  My favorite change that I made to the house in recent months:

Drum roll, please...

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OPEN SHELVING IN THE KITCHEN.

Something I've had my heart set on for some time, but I wanted to really weigh the pros and cons before I yanked the cupboards out and all that mess.  Not to mention the whole convincing of the Shauny.  I try to include him in these things since I guess it is his house too.  ;)

(Took pics in the middle of swapping out the white knobs for shiny brass!)

These shelves are just about my favorite thing in general.  I made them a while ago from the frame of my old water bed from high school.  Haha.  That just sounds funny to me.  I spied the old frame pieces in the rafters of my parents' garage one day and decided they had a higher purpose to serve.

I sanded, stained, and poly-ed until they became just what I was looking for in kitchen shelves.  I've had them on a couple different walls in here until I finally decided to go for it and take out those upper cabinets.

I'm in love and now that they've been up for a couple months I am sure I made the right decision.  Space is not something I can afford to waste in this kitchen and I felt that there was a lot of wasted space with the cabinets.  ESPECIALLY the corner cabinet.  I couldn't reach anything that wasn't right up front and that was on the lower shelf.  The upper shelf?  Forget it!  Now all of my things are within my reach, even on the higher shelf.  It's quite liberating.

Not only the accessibility, but the look of open shelving has always been appealing to me.  I get to put my collection on display.  And for a person who loves her things this is very gratifying.  I also keep daily essentials right out in the open.  Convenient and cute in their glass jars.

I don't have any problems with dust because I've filled my shelves with things that are in pretty regular rotation and used daily or weekly.  My stove isn't nearby so I haven't had to worry about grease.  However, that will eventually change as the plan is to move the stove to the area where the fridge currently sits.  I'll have to keep you updated on that aspect.

My shelves are very sturdy.  I used basic, nothing fancy brackets from Home Depot appropriately sized for my shelf depth and weight.  We also made sure that the brackets were placed correctly to screw into the wall studs.  I have a ton of crap on them, including my heavy dutch oven, and they remain stable.  It was a lot of stud finding, measuring, drilling, re-drilling, and hole-filling (as for those last two, we just suck at finding studs) but worth it for the end result.

Open shelves aren't for everybody, but they are for me!  If you're considering them for your space, do your research and weigh the pros and cons.  There're lots of great examples to look at on the internet.  One thing that I did before deciding on them was to find and read about other bloggers who turned to open shelving and reviewed their performance thus far.

If you have any questions on these babies that I haven't thought of feel free to ask!

This setup has been a major design trend in recent years, but I think its here to stay for a while.  Would you ever take the plunge into open shelving in your kitchen?  Have you already?