(before picture of a messy and boring sink)

(after hanging everything on the wall; look at the adorable folding dish drainer on the right!)

Just that title alone is beautiful sounding. There is nothing more awful then cramming a cutting board full of raw chicken onto a kitchen counter already overcrowded with stuff. Necessary stuff to be sure; you can’t think of a single item on there that you use infrequently enough to deal with having to pull it out from the cabinet every time you reach for it. You really don’t want to just throw the chicken into the hot pan with those gross looking bits of fat on it, but you also don’t want raw chicken rubbing up against your coffee maker either while you wrestle with it on your tiny cutting board wedged onto the edge of the counter. You’re pretty sure at least that the chicken didn’t make actual contact with the coffee pot, you think.

Thankfully, Ikea has swooped in with a brilliant and affordably priced organizational idea to save the day (again). The Grundtal Kitchen Series puts needed things like a dish drainer and a cup of commonly used cooking utensils in the airspace somewhere above your kitchen counter. You affix sleek looking bars just below the cabinets above the countertop and then use sleek looking hooks to hang whatever your heart desires. Every time I visit the store there seem to be even more hangable kitchen accessories (brief aside: now that I am in my mid-twenties, I get UNBELIEVABLY excited by hangable kitchen accessories. My bratty 10 year old self would have been highly skeptical of the sanity of my 25 year old self).

(before of the area between the stove and fridge, which is too small for anything, but gets used for EVERYTHING)

(after of the newly very spacious counter; this is Manhattan, it IS spacious)