Kitchen Gre-Vamp

Our planned Kitchen Green-Vamp

Some small changes to the kitchen in our rental apartment are hopefully coming soon.

We've rearranged our livingroom to allow our dining table to go into the corner. It is currently nestled into a small nook in our kitchen too tight to sit out and acting only as a shelf to place things.

In it's place in the kitchen I'm considering purchasing a commercial style kitchen shelving unit. On the shelving I'd like to store my glass containers containing things like sugar, flax seed, rice, etc... as my cabinets are currently filled to capacity. I thought it would be storage and visually pleasing. Much of those types of items are stored in containers similar to the one shown below.
Additionally I thought that some colorful containers would be great to house my kitchen towels and rags. I was thinking something like these mini trash cans below. They even come with lids. I'd like to have at least one for the dirty rags to be stored before their weekly washing. This would allow us to eliminate our paper towel usage almost entirely. we currently go through rags at about a rate of 3-4 a week when I cook regularly. Smaller dish towels are great to use to wash dishes rather than sponges and because of regular washings, they harbor less bacteria.I've broken yet another couple of glasses... they are slowly diminishing into nothingness! I refuse to switch to plastic but have decided that I will replace my glasses not with new glasses but reclaimed glasses from thrift stores and mason jars. I can buy a box of 12 mason jars for as $8 -$17 new and who knows if I get them from thrift stores!

I'd also like to slowly start replacing our cheaper and breaking cooking tools with more sustainable products like: cast iron, strong wooden spoons, bamboo boards (which we did start), and good quality knives. These changes mean we'd replace less and have these items for our lives. I know we can't invest too much on this front... but a wedding registry is in our future ... yey for that!

Hopefully once Paul and I buy a house in whatever state we end up in we can make the necessary renovations in order to create the greenest home we can afford and live in. Hopefully the small changes we can make now will make a huge difference in our rental apartment. And hopefully I can find much of what we need to make this happen on freecycle, craigslist, and thrift stores.