Last year I wrote about Decorating With Collections, sharing how my new home didn’t include space to display my entire teapot collection. My solution was to rotate the teapots every quarter, allowing me to showcase all of them throughout the course of a year.
The spring portion of my teapot collection at home in the kitchen.
Rotating the collection means that every three months I have to pack and unpack teapots. Although not hard to do, it’s a bother dragging boxes back and forth from the garage every three months and it’s a risk to my collection because every time I rebox teapots for storage I worry that the next time I unpacked them I something might be broken. I needed a better solution.
Looking Up To Storage
While unpacking my holiday teapots and whining to my husband about the bother, he matter-of-factly said, “Figure out where we can put some shelves and I’ll install them for you.” I’d thought about about a display location other than the kitchen before and my solution was boxing and storing. But that clearly hadn’t proved ideal over the past 9 months so I took him up on his offer and roamed our house, once again looking for space to accommodate shelves for my teapots. Our open concept floor plan and walls of windows to the lake barely left room to hang art, let alone enough shelf space for all of my teapots. A quandary!
It finally dawned on me that the inside of my pantry was the only possible solution. After estimating the amount of space, checking the height of some of my taller teapots and talking with my husband, we decided on an overhead shelf above the current pantry storage.
My husband painted and installed “L” brackets to support painted 1″ x 10″ wide plywood boards all the way around the top of the pantry.
A run of shelving was placed 12″ down from the ceiling.
The teapot shelves run the full length of all four sides of the room – including over the door.
With a 9′ ceiling reaching the teapots requires a ladder – but no more boxing and unboxing. They might get dusty but they won’t get broken while waiting their turn for display!
Try It!
Put overhead storage to work for you. If you want to give it a try simply consider:
- Type of brackets: utilitarian (like the ones used in my pantry) or decorative (to suit your room)
- Type of shelving: wood, wire, glass
- Size of shelves: make sure they’re wide enough to hold your items and strong enough to hold the weight of the load
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