Drawer dilemma

One of the things I love about our new house is the kitchen. It is about the same square footage as my old kitchen, but there is at least three times as much cabinet space. In the old house, every cabinet and drawer was crammed full and some kitchen supplies even spilled over into the linen closet in the hallway (and it's not that I have a ton of stuff, believe me!).

When we were unpacking the kitchen I actually had to make decisions as to where to put things. Before, plates and casserole dishes and blenders went were they would fit. That was the only requirement: it had to fit. But in this kitchen I had to decide if I wanted my casserole dishes near the oven or the dishwasher or maybe in between in the island. Kind of a nice problem to have, isn't it? It took a little while and a bit of rearranging and adjusting, but I think my new kitchen operates fairly efficiently now.

But, my poor husband has yet to figure out the system. He is such a wonderful help and does the bulk to the dish washing each day, but he has yet to figure out where things belong. Apparently his biggest nemesis is the drawers.

In our old kitchen we had six drawers total with half of them being very narrow so they didn't hold much. There wasn't exactly a lot of choices available for where to put a particular item. Eric would still occasionally get confused, but since there weren't many places to look I could track down what I was looking for fairly quickly.

Well, our new kitchen as 10 very large, glorious drawers and I am in organizational heaven. I have all of my cooking utensils in a drawer near the stove, all my baking things (measuring cups, rubber spatulas, measuring spoons, pastry cutters, etc) are in a drawer near the designated baking area where the flour, sugar, etc sit at the ready in canisters on the counter. I have a drawer for silverware and a drawer for dish towels and two drawers are actually completely empty. Isn't that cool! Empty drawers!

Yesterday I needed a 1/4 cup measuring cup for something I was making. I actually have two of them, but neither one was in sight. I checked the baking drawer (where they belonged), the cooking drawer, the silverware drawer, the dishwasher and under the few dishes still left in the sink. Nothing. So, I just improvised and did without it and moved on.

Well, this morning I was getting Gustin a drink and went to the drawer with all the sippy cup lids. And, you guessed it, there were my missing measuring cups along with an orange peeler and some other things that obviously don't fall under the heading of "sippy cup lids". Poor Eric. He really is trying his best! I can picture him standing there holding a measuring cup in each hand and gazing around the kitchen trying to decide where to put them. His brow is furrowed and he's starting to stress so he decides to go with his best option: the drawer that is closest. He throws the measuring cups in the drawer and closes it without ever taking a glance at what the contents of the drawer are and continues on with wiping the counters and taking out the trash, never giving those measuring cups another thought.

So, I just need to remember, when all else fails, think "sippy cup".