Where Do You Store All Those Dishes?

Welcome to another episode of Show and Tell Friday with our hostess Cindy
over at My Romantic Home. Join all the other participants to see what they have to show
and tell about this week.

Probably the most often asked question on The Little Round Table is, "Where and how do you store all the dishes and accessories??" Which got me to thinking about what I actually do and is there a logical plan involved.

Main Entry: store
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: collect and put aside

Synonyms: accumulate, amass, bank, cache, clear away, clear up, cumulate, keep, keep in reserve, lay away, lay up, lock away, lock up, mothball, pack away, put away, put by, put in order, reserve, salt away, save, save for rainy day, sock away, squirrel, stack away, stash, stash away, stockpile, store away, stow, stow away, tidy, tidy away, tidy up, warehouse

Some of the synonyms for "to store" sound a bit "obsessive" ...... well yeah, I'm guilty!  There was a plan when we designed our retirement home out in the boonies of the San Francisco Bay Area.  We bought the land in 2004, spent a year permitting the land and construction details, built in 2006 and moved in the last week of October 2006.

I had a plan for where everything would go and implemented said plan as we moved over several months time from our prior home about 40 miles away.  Then about six months ago I started reconfiguring where things "lived" in the new house.  It's a classic pattern for me.  The actual living in a house for a couple of years, generally dictates where things should really be.

A post about my kitchen last week on Show and Tell Friday showed where my vintage Fiesta is now displayed.  It was in a glass front display closet in the pantry hall, but that's all changed and other things are now on the move too.

My "good china" has always lived in the base of the antique pine hutch, which can be seen on some of the posts from the last few months like this one from November. Great storage, but difficult to get to on the low deep shelves, as I finally acknowledge that my knees and lifting power are not what they used to be.

So now the "good dishes" live in this reproduction French Directoire cabinet, along with some large serving pieces and sets of decorative dessert/salad plates.

Storing all the cups and soup bowls always takes up so much shelf space, so I installed plain old cup hooks to save space.  It works incredibly well and about doubles the ususable space on that particular shelf.

So that's my perfect solution for the "good dishes," still to come are all the other dishes, the linens, the accessories, glassware and flatware. Stay tuned and I'll get to those in coming weeks.