Wow so this post has been in draft now for 18 months--I definitely thought I already blogged about this one, but apparently I only completed this post in my own head. This is a follow up to a post from three years ago about trying to organize and display our liquor bottles. We found the solution, as usual, at our favorite store--IKEA! The BAGGEBO:
It's a petite display cabinet that had a good amount of shelf space and fit neatly in our dining room as book ends to our sideboard. (Fun fact, it's $5 more expensive now than it was when I took that photo in-store almost two years ago.)
We installed a lighting system on a smart plug that turns on about a half hour before sunset every evening. It provides good ambient lighting and displays the alcohol that we very rarely actually drink. Lately it is more like art:
One problem with this furniture is that the two sides are a sort of mesh, which looks cool but means that the shelves and bottles get very dusty. And it's a big pain to clean. Obviously no display cabinet is air-tight, but having the two sides more-or-less completely open means that the dust builds up pretty fast.Funny enough, when I started this post, I figured the story was done. But then in a walk around IKEA (did I mention we go there a lot?), we found this beauty:
The
BLALIDEN, which didn't exist two years ago when we found our cabinets, actually solves almost every problem that remains. It is glass on all sides (though, admittedly, I like the white metal back on ours) and is taller, meaning one extra shelf to store more bottles--or space out the ones in the case. Still, at $120 each, it seems like an expensive and unnecessary upgrade to something that works almost just as well. Still, will this post have a sequel? Who knows...
In other kitchen news, we recently upgraded our cabinets by installing soft-close stops on them (by "we" of course I mean "D"):
Now we don't have to gently close the cabinet doors--we can just swing them and let the soft-close mechanism take over. This has been especially noticeable on our glass doors. Just listen to this comparison (as I'm sure will be obvious, the soft-close door goes first, followed by one without the soft-close):
