More? There's More?

300th post! Woo-hoo! I feel like I should have baked a cake or something. Maybe there's some leftover Christmas candy somewhere. (on edit: Huh. The Blogger dashboard is telling me this is the 300th post, but the sidebar only adds up to 291. Weird. I feel less celebratory now. Well, at least I didn't bake a cake.)

Anyway, another day, another space conquered. (Partly.)

My awesome friends MiHae and Jen came over today to help me deal with parts of the kitchen that weren't working so well. We reorganized and decluttered some overstuffed cabinets and kicked some stairwell butt.

Stairwell?

Yeah. It's an old house which once upon a time had been divided into two apartments, which were then reunited and reconfigured and generally messed with. One of the few areas that wasn't seamlessly reintegrated into the new footprint was a back staircase. The top half became a half-bath. The bottom half?

A dead zone. (This, by the way, is the "after" picture. "Before" was a frightening tower of abandoned and long-forgotten kitchen crap flotsam.)

I would like this to be more of a pantry some day. Something like this:

(From Martha Stewart of course.)

I have the advantage of being able to use the actual risers, if necessary/possible, but I haven't figured out how to make really efficient use of the space. Most of the really good ideas I've seen online take advantage of the space under a stairwell. But how best to take advantage of the actual stairs?

Right now, I'm considering putting in shelves (skinny on top, for canned goods, wider below for appliances and paper goods and similar) on the lefthand wall, and then picture rails (for platters and the like) or wall mounted baskets (for onions and potatoes and such) on the other side.

Any advice, my invisible readers? I am all ears. Seriously. Please.

P.S. For the curious, the majority of the dethroned stuff has been relegated to one of three places: trash/recycling, bags and boxes to donate (some of which has, in fact, been donated!), and the garage. Soon to be known as The Dreaded Garage. Once the weather warms up again (hopefully long after I've finished the Stuff Detox of the rest of the house), I'll do one last massive purge. I once had hopes of holding a garage sale to get a little something out of our unloved belongings, but I've been saying that for four years. It's never gonna happen.