A small change

In my last post about my kitchen I mentioned this little problem area:

Somehow clear glass does not do a good job of hiding the microwave/cord disaster ugliness. Who knew?

I have been planning a pretty clever hack to cover up the cord area entirely, but since I probably won't get to that project until things warm up a bit (can't use my claimed workshop space - the alley behind our building- when it is holding several feet of snow) I thought I would try and use things I had on hand to better distract from the things I dislike in that corner. I used a placemat from a set a friend gave me at Christmas, a book end I had in my bedroom, and a few of my favorite thrift store collected cookbooks.

Now the area looks like this:

 You can still see the cords, but only if you are looking straight on, which involves standing right in front of the pantry door. Otherwise, it looks like this:

I think it's an improvement. And I actually love how the red book covers pop against that blue. Unfortunately I can't really make the microwave stop looking...microwave-y. Oh well. Now it has pretty vintage cookbooks on it, what's wrong with that?

Oh, and if you are wondering what happened to our growing wine cork collection, I simply moved it across the room to sit on top of the wire cart near the window. I'll post a pic soon once a few other little things come together.