baking trays | organised castle

Our home is only 4 years old and we have lived here for a little over 2 years. While it was in almost pristine condition when we bought it, there were a few things that we wanted to change.

One was to extend the pantry which we did and you can read about it here. The other change which we wanted to make to the kitchen was to replace the freestanding stove which included a gas cooktop with a built in oven and induction cooktop.

The original stove was 900mm wide which is really much too big for our needs and drew an enormous amount of power to heat it for GMan’s breadmaking adventures. Additionally, we were keen to eliminate the only gas appliance from the house for both environmental and health considerations. One of the complicating factors was the engineered stone benchtop which was going to need to be replaced and it is no longer in use in Australia. We chose to match the bench to the Laminex bench in the pantry and keep the engineered stone on the island bench.

This is what it looked like before.

Work in progress. The drawers were all removed and the kickboard made slightly narrower the compensate for the additional thickness of the benchtop or otherwise the splashback tiles would have been disrupted.

And in a matter of a week it was all done.

The cabinetmaker cleverly made 2 narrow cupboards on either side of the new oven which is 600mm wide. This means that the oven and cooktop remain centred under the exhaust fan. We are just awaiting the arrival and installation of the door handles but in the meantime you can see how useful they are going to be.

I no longer have to rifle through a jumble of baking trays in the bottom drawer.

The whole process went extremely smoothly in less than a week and I am very happy with the result. I am loving the instantaneous heat from the induction cooktop.

So the saying goes………….. This is definitely true when it comes to decluttering. Trying to justify why you want to keep something to another person is more of a challenge than just doing it yourself.

When we had the kitchen renovated about 4 years ago we chose to have mostly drawers rather than cupboards and I am really pleased with that decision.

On Sunday I cleaned out 5 drawers plus 1 small cupboard in the kitchen. I actually removed the drawers from their runners, emptied the contents and completely cleaned the surrounding area as well as the drawer.

The large drawer below the microwave holds baking tins and trays. The Duke and I went through each item and have rehomed several trays and tins that are no longer used for one reason or another. Mostly it was because we simply no longer (or never did) bake those items. It meant that I was able to consolidate the extra tins that were in the top cupboard into the same drawer as the rest of the baking trays.

Here is the end result.

One of the other drawers that got the treatment was what some people would call a junk drawer but I refuse to give it that name as it is not junk. Everything in here has a use and is used regularly. I have decluttered it severa times over the past few years and each time I manage to reduce a bit more and I am pretty happy with it now. This time I have finally let go of the remnants of rolls of clingwrap and plastic for separating items in the freezer. I have not used either for many years so it was time to move them along.