Thanksgiving and Christmas are the time of year that many of us decide it’s time to bring out the “Good Dishes”. This year I decided to join the many who celebrate the season this way. My son is finally old enough to not only treat my fine china with care, but not drop it on the way to the kitchen.
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Fine china handed down from mom. |
Recently I have been working with a client who inherited her grandmother’s fine china, silver and crystal. However, she has a set of her own china she would like to display. She shared with me that it is all sentimental and although she wants to keep it, she doesn’t want it out. She and I have been working for several weeks in fact, sorting through and organizing a treasure trove of items inherited from her grandmother. She has quite a bit in fact, and fortunately a large home to store it all, but that’s for another blog. This blog is about how to store your fine china; focus Maureen.
My client and I discussed ways she can store the china. Fortunately, I had already organized nearly her whole house, and knew of all the potential locations she could store her china, and for practical and logical reasons it came back to storing them in her kitchen. She and I both have the kind of kitchen with tall upper cabinets, and in my opinion, this is the ideal place to store the fine china.
Follow my logic and see if it works for you:
I am only 5’5” on a good day, so that top row of shelving is not one I am going to access on a regular basis. Yes, I have tall men-folk in my house (as does my client), but I am still not going to put anything that I access regularly up there. If I have an entire section of my kitchen cabinets not being used, and I need a place for my fine china, to me it’s a no-brainer; even if I only use it once a year. And, I do not have a sideboard nor a china cabinet, as others might.
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| Panoramic of my upper cabinet top shelf, housing the china. |
Most of that top shelf of the upper cabinet for my client was also vacant, and even after organizing her kitchen and arranging the rest of her items in a logical, systematic way, the top shelf remained nearly vacant, as did above the oven and refrigerator. We realized for her, those are the 3 best areas she can use to store her fine china. The next question remained was how to protect them.
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1970’s style brings happy memories. |
You may, or may not know this, but there are protectors made specifically for fine china. I happen to have the ones my mother gave me when she gave me her fine china. They are totally 70’s, which is pretty darn tacky today, but they still do their job and honestly make me smile when I see them, so I’ve not replaced them. They keep the accumulation of dust or dirt from settling on them over time. I would recommend them. I haven’t used my fine china for many years, and when I pulled them out this year, the china still looked like new. This not only preserves the life of the china, but also cuts down on preparation for using them. We just gently rinsed them before using them (just in case).
So, to sum it all up. In my opinion, the ideal place to store your fine china is in the kitchen. If you haven’t got a sideboard or china cabinet, but you do have space on the top shelf of your upper cabinets, above your fridge or stove, those are all ideal spaces. Purchasing protectors not only protects your china, but preserves it. In the long run, it is totally worth the purchase.
If you are wondering where to purchase the protectors I mentioned, I know for certain they are available at the Container Store.
Where do you store your fine china? Do you do something different? Share your ideas!