having a few floating shelves is a great way to store kitchen items without taking up a lot of room like having extra large cupboards would do in a tiny kitchen. when you only have a few small cupboards like we do, sometimes having some dishes on floating shelves is a must. i put our shelves on our chalkboard wall so the color of the dishes would pop off the black wall. i love the idea that something with purpose can also give a sense of decor at the same time. to do this i put our favorite dishes with a few decorative items on the white shelves so they are pleasant to look at while still having storage purposes as well. i bought our floating shelves from ikea for about $30. the dishes are from anthropologie and the wooden block set of london is from muji.

after camden and i made the decision to move to our current place, one big concern started to arise which was, “where is all of our stuff going to go?!?”. this new found dilemma was seriously causing us major stress. i, in particular, could not see how we could possibly make our lives fit into this teeny, tiny, 1920’s, pre-war apartment. we finally decided about fifty percent of our things had to go. we got rid of two dressers, a bed frame, a couch, our dining tables and chairs, our bookshelves, about half of our clothing, plus more; all because they were too big to fit into the confined space of our new home. even after all this purging, we were still worried how exactly it was all going to fit. our new place only had one small closet in the bedroom (about one tenth the size of our previous closet) for clothing and one other pantry in the main room. after much brainstorming, i finally decided to curtain off a section of our dining room (originally advertised as a bedroom) in order to create a custom storage space. the thing was, i didn’t want it to look like storage. i wanted it to be all tucked away, neat and out of sight, unaware it was even there. our dining room, originally advertised as the second bedroom, was awkwardly shaped and curtaining the room off to form a square made a future layout easier to see. covering up a window was a small price to pay considering the rooms small size and open access to the rest of the house where light openly flows. we now have room for all that crud we don’t necessarily wan’t to see with easy access when its use is needed. honestly without this, i don’t know how we would be living here today.