Why I’ll Always Follow the “Dinner Plate Rule” Every Time I Go to an Open House

I absolutely love my house, but there’s one room I hate — my kitchen. Based on the age of the appliances that came with the house and the style, I’d guess it was remodeled in the late ’80s, about a decade after the house was built, and it is not an efficient use of the small (only 100 square foot) space. 

The kitchen is like a comedy of design errors. The hood over the stove makes it so there’s a pass-through, which is nice, but I can’t actually see people in the dining area without squatting below it because it’s too low. 

Meanwhile, the closet under the stairs is mostly wasted space, due to the tilt of the stairs above a too-high shelf. It’s nearly impossible to reach into the back corner of the closet and store anything there. There are two corner cabinets that are basically black holes for Tupperware and appliances I rarely use. Don’t even ask me what’s back there, because I can’t remember!

There are cabinets on all sides of the closet, but they go all the way to the ceiling, and I can’t access the high shelves easily. Worst of all, they aren’t deep enough for anything deeper than a dinner plate, which it barely fits if at all. I’ve had to get really creative when it comes to storing my flatware, plates, and kitchen appliances, but I dream of a kitchen remodel — not so much to make it fancier, but to make it a better use of the space.

A lesson I learned from the process of picking out my house is not that I should have chosen another home (because, like I said, I really do love my home) or budgeted for an immediate remodel (because that’s just unrealistic); it’s actually that I should have brought a dinner plate when I was touring the space. In fact, this lesson feels so true to me that I’ve even built a rule out of it — “The Dinner Plate Rule.”

I know this sounds silly: Why bring a dinner plate and not just a measuring tape? I’m sure my Realtor had a measuring tape available, if I’d had the foresight to measure. But while a measuring tape would have sufficed, I’d still bring a full plate, for a few reasons. Mainly, I’m a visual person. A measuring tape would have told me I could have fit something as wide as a dinner plate in my cabinets, but being able to see the space (or lack thereof) was necessary for me to be able to plan how to organize the kitchen to maximize space and adjust for the small cabinets when I moved in. 

Also, much like my myriad kitchen appliances and Tupperware, my dinner plates aren’t square or rectangular — they’re round, meaning that the way they fit in my cabinets isn’t something that I would have seen with a ruler. And while I could have brought in a salad plate, a pasta bowl, and all my mugs to see how they’d fit in the cabinet, a single dinner plate is easy (and flat) enough to carry around with me anywhere. 

Plus, I would have been able to use it in all the different cabinets in my kitchen and across the home to get a sense of the depth of the space. It’s not unlike a hack I recently read about where a real estate agent said they always bring a clothes hanger with them when they tour homes to make sure that the closets are actually deep enough to function.

But back to my dreaded kitchen cabinet. The shelving that I can access is not deep, but it is tall, so I had to pick which high-use items needed to be placed on the shelves at eye level, which nonbreakable kid-friendly kitchen materials needed to go in the lower cabinets, and what stuff got to be relegated to the netherworld of the corner cabinet and top shelves. I have a footstool, sure, and can get the plates and other items I’ve had to put up high, but the small, square layout means I need to put it away or else risk tripping.

Wire baskets and small plate shelves in each of the cabinets helped me store things without having to stack them up really high, and, after an initial adjustment phase, I’ve come to make the most of my small kitchen. However, all of these adjustments were made after I discovered the shallow shelves and was mid-unpacking, when everything (including my personal life) was in chaos. Planning ahead more in the future would have reduced my stress. If I’m ever on the market again, I’ll bring a plate along with me to see what I can fit in the cabinets. And maybe I’ll grab a hanger, too.