Landing Zone Refresh
Our home is situated in a way that
1) hardly anyone uses the front door,
2) most guests enter through the parlor (aka side) door, and
3) we always enter through the back door (aka the kitchen).
The kitchen was gutted and remodeled before we moved in. There was a side porch that would have been used for seasonal storage that was taken out to make the space bigger.
While there is plenty that I like about our kitchen, there is also plenty that I would change, starting with lightening it up! Dark countertops, dark cabinets, dark backsplash mixed with a tan paint color = a dungeon.
We won’t be making any major upgrades that we can’t take with us considering we rent this home.
The door in which you use to enter and exit the home is really important to functional design. Most front doors open up to a receiving area complete with a coat closet. Sounds good, except most of us don’t enter and exit through our front doors. We use side doors and back doors.
And those doors are usually attached to a room or kitchen that isn’t set up to receive you and send you off with all your functional needs.
In our kitchen, we started out with a small breakfast table and two chairs in the nook by the door. It was snuggled in tight but I noticed we rarely ate there and the table was a collection for stuff coming in and going out. So I sold the set on Facebook Marketplace to make room for something else.
I thought about moving two chairs to the nook to make it more cozy and offer up seating for when I’m watching Raymond cook. ;) Or when we have guests over as congregation tends to happen in the kitchen.
Something like this from Kate Marker Interiors:
Raymond however reminded me that spiders and other creepy crawly things come in often from the door (HOW?!). Of that I will agree, the thought of relaxing in a comfy chair only to find a spider crawling on my arm would send those chairs to the firepit heap!
The space has been furniture free for awhile now yet I started to notice something.
Clutter.
And since clutter leaves clues. I decided to investigate. What is this clutter all about?
Stated another way, what are our functional needs for this space? I’m using this intention (& investigation) as the foundation for my landing zone refresh.
What do we need from this space?
A place to hold things that need to go
Returns to a store
Returns to a person
Donations
A place to hold our recycling (curbside was cancelled in our area so I take our recycling every other week)
Breaking it down further, how many storage containers do I need for recycling?
Arbonne
Glass & aluminum cans
Steel cans
Plastic & plastic bottle tops
Paper
A place for our daily things (we currently have this on our island which I would be delighted to move off)
Keys
Sunglasses
Errands list, gift cards, etc
Cody’s leash & collar
Hooks for bags
My purse
Raymond’s work bag(s)
Here is a rough mockup of what I would like to see in this space:
Move the plants to a shelf that spans the width of the window. We don’t have drapes or blinds in this room and we don’t open those windows.
Purchase a long table or shelving unit to span the width of the windows. I would like it to look like an extension of the cabinets. A buffet with a combination of drawers and cabinets would be perfect. Open shelves would be my next option but then that leads me to containers.
My preference would be plastic or a sturdy container covered in cloth. I’m not a fan of woven wicker as it scratches and it is hard to clean. The recycling containers need to be big but not large. I prefer for our recycling to not pile up on us so I want the size of the container to boss me around by saying, “Hey girl! Time to take this stuff to the recycling center!”
Here is an example of what I don’t want with a table and baskets:
The baskets are not uniform and they are too small. Two large storage ottomans would look better and be more useful, but again I need more than two containers.
SIDEBOARD IDEAS
CONSOLE TABLE IDEAS
STORAGE CONTAINER IDEAS
I love the sculpted bins by SortJoy! I would buy the set of three and use as recycling containers.
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