Thanksgiving Preparations: Cleaning Up the Bar Area

When I posted about our kitchen a few months ago, I indicated there were a couple areas I needed to work on cleaning up a bit.  One of those areas were the glass door cupboards above our beverage fridge/bar area.  I worked on tweaking that area a bit using mostly things I had on hand already.

Here is the before picture:

And here is how the same space is looking now:

Lights Off.

Lights On.

The before and after differences may be subtle, but we really had a random collection of cut crystal and ceramic bowls in the spaces before.  It makes more sense now and has a cohesive color scheme going as well.

Starting from the left:

There are alternating blue and green dishes with brown napkins on top.  The green dishes were picked up last year before Thanksgiving on super clearance at Target.  They are our turkey day plates!  

I found the blue plates this spring for $2.48/4 pack at Target thinking they might be nice in our basement once we get some shelving in the bar area down there.  For now, I like the way they look in our upstairs cupboards.

And the next cabinet over contains:

A wire turkey that I picked up at Walmart for $3.25 on clearance.  I think we'll throw a cloth napkin in it and serve our rolls for Thanksgiving dinner in this guy!

3 nearly identical gravy boats in various colors.  Want to know why I have three gravy boats?  Because for the first two years that we hosted Thanksgiving, we didn't have a gravy boat, and it was sort of an annoying thing to be missing.  Shortly after Thanksgiving 2 years ago I picked up the white one at Kohl's on super sale and then forgot about it (it matches our every day white dishes).  Then right before Thanksgiving last year, I found the green one at Walmart.  We used the green one last year at Thanksgiving.  Then I found the blue one below at Target early last year:

It was on clearance for $1.98, and for some reason I bought it.  I don't know why.  I just found it in a cupboard two days ago when I was trying to find things around the house to put in my glass door cupboards. Maybe it had been completely ingrained in my head that we didn't have a gravy boat for so long that I felt the need to buy three of them?  I have no idea. ' Hi.  I'm Beth and I own 3 gravy boats.'  Conveniently the colors go with my green and blue dining room/kitchen/house, so I'm okay with it.  I have no idea which one we'll use this year.  It may be a game turkey time decision.

Heirloom crystal bowl with Michael's newspaper mache fruit.  

 Moving On...

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The rest of the cupboard area is full of glassware and my wonderful West Elm mugs that I posted about here.    Also, conveniently, our entire family has names that are 4 letters in length, so for special occasions (ie: Birthdays), I envision us spelling out a name in our cupboard like 'BETH' or 'BILL' or LUCKY'S/CHARM'S REAL NAME:)!

I still have to work on the wine holder rack shown in the picture above.  I really don't see it being used to store wine for a LONG time for a couple reasons.  The first being the shatter factor of wine bottles around young children, and the second being that we aren't big wine drinkers.  I forgot to remove the washable table cloths that we used as food catchers under Charm's booster seat for the longest time.  (They have been cleaned before storing them in the wine holder!)  Does anyone have any ideas about what we could put in that space?  The only things I could think of are 2L soda bottles, but that could be a disaster as well and rolled up blankets, but that would be seriously weird in a kitchen.  

I did take a little time and clean up the cook book area of our island, although I would like to throw in a woven basket or two on the shelf: 

This shelf is opposite to my rainbow book shelf on the other side of the island:

So there you have it...a mostly organized bar area in need of one great wine rack idea and a couple woven baskets!

If anyone is interested, I'll be back this afternoon with a parenting tip that has been working really well in our house lately.  Otherwise, have a wonderful weekend!