America’s Next Top Shelves
Shelves have always been sort of a challenge for us, and we think for many other people as well. It’s tough to decide what to display on shelves while balancing attractive design with function.
I struggled with this even as a kiddo. My bedroom growing up had a wall full of shelves, and I would spend endless hours re-organizing my shelves and switching around their contents to look nicer. Stuffed animals would go on the bottom shelves because they were larger and “heavier” looking, books were where I could reach them and the porcelain dolls were higher up because I didn’t play with them every day. Yes – it’s true some of my fondest childhood memories were spent organizing. Don’t judge.
Back to present day – our 1950′s kitchen is full of great shelves. Shelves built into the lower cabinets, the upper cabinets, now over our fridge and around our kitchen sink and window.
You’ll see in the before photos of our kitchen how the shelves around our kitchen sink window are pretty cluttered and not really organized in any way.
Now that we’re thinking more carefully about our shelves and considering them a feature in our kitchen, we’ve looked around the house to find items to gussie them up a bit and make them something worth looking at.
Here are the items we used, with the goal of spending zero dollars:
- a small glass vase that we’re filling with wine corks slowly but surely and our birdie candle holder from Goodwill
- framed photos that we move all around the house
- a teal piece of pottery we picked up from the neighborhood pottery sale this summer, made by Pepper Fluke
- a wooden “W” painted bright red to pick up the colors of our rug and dishes that accent the lighter colors of our kitchen, and a small yellow bowl scored at a thrift store ages ago
- succulents we bought from the Duke Gardens plant sale this summer
The only tips we have when decorating shelves are to shelf only the items that you love and that are attractive enough to be on display all the time. Also, look for ways to bring in accent colors from your room so that eyes naturally move to the shelves. We did this with the bright red “W”. And of course, less is more.
Anyone else out there a bit shelf-phobic as we’ve been in the past? Anyone spend their childhood cleaning and organizing things? It’s okay you’re among friends.
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