I moved the toaster

I just rearranged the appliances on the counters.

One problem with my kitchen is that there’s a counter that goes
around a corner, leaving a black hole both in the cabinets and on
the countertop that’s a lot less useful than you’d like it to
be.

I thought that would be a good place for the microwave oven,
but there’s no way to work without taking up the space that the
oven door would need to open there, so instead I have the microwave on
the counter between the fire escape door and the dining room
window. This makes that counter, which you need to use for
loading and unloading the refrigerator, a lot smaller than you’d
like.

I’m not currently using the toaster as often as I have in the
past, both because of my greens for
breakfast discovery, and because a good bakery opened up down
the street, so I sometimes go buy croissants when I would have
formerly made toast.

So my current idea is that the dead area in the corner is used
for small appliances that are used often but not daily, and is
flanked by the knife rack which is still a bit improvised but
doesn’t fall apart too often as long as you don’t try to use the
giant chef’s knife, which I only use for cutting pizza. It’s a
franken-knife rack — I combined the magnetic strip I never
managed to affix to anything with the rack of vertical slots which
I snarfed from Bonnie’s kitchen. On the
other side, the smaller appliances are held in place by the slow
cooker/rice cooker/pressure cooker, which is used several times a
week.

Right now the toaster, the stick blender, and the hand mixer
live there. I’ve been sharpening the knives on the arkansas
stone, so the knife sharpener went into the appliance cabinet,
along with the waffle iron which I haven’t used very often since I
bought it.

This makes the appliance cabinet more crowded than it should
be. The obvious thing to do about that is to discard or donate
the bread machine, which has seen better days, but I’ve been
trying to decide whether

Obviously one of the advantages to doing something like this is
that you move everything out and clean under it. (I cheated and
didn’t do the microwave, yet.) So some spiders crawled out and
were very annoyed at me, but I assured them I wasn’t going to be
doing this every week. I pointed out that there were some
housekeepers who do something like it every day, and they wouldn’t
want to live there at all.