2011 December 19 | Beneath My Heart

I have loved the look of open shelving for several years now.

I made a couple of them for our previous kitchen.

Some people say they are a fad and will go out of style. But I’m okay with that. I love them NOW, so that’s why I took my old cabinets down. (Carpe Diem, I say!)

After I took them down, I was left with this…

Notice ugly soffit.

It had to go.

So down it went. And so did a ton of insulation.

I almost didn’t survive that day. It was not even funny.

But we cleaned it up, and repaired the holes in the ceiling and walls…

Oh yeah, and we ditched the old pantry too!

So, let’s fast forward to this weekend.

I bought some corbels like the ones I had used in my previous kitchen and had them ready for my hubby to put up…

He put three of the corbels up on the wall, and I noticed TWO things immediately:

1. These corbels were too small for the shelves we were installing.

2. They were not the “look” I was after.

We were going to be installing 16 of these bad boys in our kitchen, and these corbels were a little too “curvy” for the look I was after. (A little too “cottagey”, if you will.)

So I returned the corbels to Home Depot and came home with some that I love.

In order to give the shelves lots of support, we made sure that each corbel was nailed into a stud in the wall.

These shelves will be holding a lot of dishes, so I am glad that the shelves to the right of the sink have three corbels each supporting them.

You can see the subway tile that we installed this past weekend too. Now that the back splash is white, we are going to have to switch out all of our tan outlets with new white ones. Ugh, the details!

Our friend, Adam, helped Cy with the kitchen this weekend. He was a huge help!!

We are going to be putting a little trim around the front of the shelves because they are just made of mdf board.

Now, I will be honest, that I am a little nervous about making my dishes look pretty on those shelves. I know they cannot be perfect, but I also don’t want the open shelves to look messy.

So I will be looking all over blogland and Pinterest for inspiration. Send me pictures of pretty open shelves if you have them. Smile

We went we only two levels of shelves even though most of the inspiration pictures I found had three levels of shelves.

Let’s take a quick look back at the “before”…

And here’s the after (so far)…

Wow! That’s a huge difference, isn’t it?!

So, do you like open shelving? Do you think it is just a fad?

(You won’t hurt my feelings if you do.)

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Oh my goodness!

Y’all would not believe the work we (okay, Cy) got finished in the kitchen this weekend! He worked a 14 hour day on Saturday! We were desperately trying to get things finished by Sunday, and we mostly did it. There are a few more things to finish up, but it looks great!

I took a bunch of pictures along the way, but we got so much done that I cannot put it in one post. So my next few posts will be to show you what we did over the weekend.

First, I want to show you the cabinets we added around the stove.

This is what our kitchen looked like before we started…

When we knocked our old pantry out and created a new one, we left a space to the left of the stove for more cabinets space.

Cy built a frame for our new lower cabinet.

The upper cabinet was one of our old cabinets that we painted white and re-used.

Since we did not have matching cabinet doors for the new lower cabinet, we decided to leave it open and add some baskets.

Over the weekend, Cy installed two more upper cabinets. The one in the middle he built. We will leave that cabinet open which is why we put a bead board backing in that cabinet.

The other two cabinets are ones we re-used, and they will have doors on them.