modern thrifter

[ OPEN SHELVES ]

If you follow me on Pinterest, you might have noticed that I’ve been pinning a lot of photos of kitchens with open shelves lately. Our plan is to (hopefully this summer) tear out most of the upper cabinets in the kitchen and replace them with simple shelves with possibly a short cabinet at the very top.

In the meantime, I’ve been anxious to try out some of the support brackets from Ikea to see if they will be up to the task of holding our dishes. We made the trek to Ikea last Saturday and picked up some wood brackets and a couple of shelves from the As-Is section. All total we spent $16 for this project.

I’m the type of person who would rather have completely bare countertops and surfaces. I had previously been storing my cookbooks and radio on top of my refrigerator, and my counter was starting to get cluttered with various dishes and bowls, so having a nice organized little space for everything makes me quite happy.

These are some of my favorite things in the kitchen: My new Jamie Oliver cookbook that my mom gave me, Meals in Minutes, which I highly recommend (really, this is such a great concept… three or four course meals with the recipes integrated so that everything finishes together), a pile of snack-sized cloth napkins that I’ve been creating out of fabric scraps, my Anri teak bowl, a butter crock that my in-laws gave me for christmas, my new little honey jar, and a cute radio so that I can listen to All Things Considered while I cook dinner.

I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike our travertine counters and backsplash. They have been on the demolition list since we’ve owned the house. When I was editing the photos, I thought I’d take a look at what the counters would look like without the backsplash (this is about a two minute photoshop job, so please don’t judge).

Though I’d still rather redo the entire thing, taking out the backsplash would be a huge improvement.

When it comes time to tearing out the cabinets and putting in the new shelves, I’d like to go with white brackets and thick wood shelves like this: 

Do any of you have open shelves in your kitchen? Do you love or hate them? I’m guessing the top shelf gets a little dusty, but I’m hoping that having a cabinet at the very top will help a little with that.