How To Safely Store Fine China and Special Occasion Dinnerware

I am guilty of having too many dishes. Quite honestly, I do not know how or why this dish thing got started. When I was in my 20s, I didn’t have two cents to rub together, however, I recall saving up to buy service for 12 of Royal Doulton Romance Collection in Juliet. How I love (and still love) these dishes. Since I store 90% of these dishes in a built-in cabinet in the basement, I want to make sure they are safe and do not get damaged from chips, cracks, breakage and dust.

Do Display Your Dishes

If you have a glass front cabinet or hutch where you can display your pretty dishes, please do so. Unfortunately I do not have anything like that, except our butler’s pantry. However, it is not big enough for dishes so primarily it holds my finer glassware.

Some Don’ts When Storing China

Newspaper~Newspaper is often a cheap and convenient packaging material, which is why it’s one of the first china storage ideas to come to mind for many people. Here’s the hitch — the ink used to print newspapers can bleed onto your dishes, meaning you’ll have to spend even more time washing them. The ink could even lead to damaged patterns if you have to scrub to remove it. Worse yet, newsprint could result in permanent staining. Brown packing paper, felt inserts or paper/styrofoam disposable plates work too.

Don’t Stack the Dishes too High~Bigger isn’t better when it comes to stacks of formal dishware. While it’s admirable to try to maximize space, higher stacks can result in plates getting scratched or broken if they slide. Additionally, all of those top dishes place a lot of pressure on the poor plate at the bottom. Therefore, it’s a good rule of thumb to stack no more than about eight plates. It’s also important to know that cups should never be stacked under any circumstances, unless you’re going for a look that involves chipped rims and handles.

Where to Put Your Extra Fine dinnerware

If you are like me and don’t have a beautiful hutch or extra shelves available, my fine dinnerware is stored in our basement. Make sure to place your packed-away dishes in an area that doesn’t see a lot of traffic. This will greatly reduce the odds of china being damaged while it’s stowed in the off seasons.

The wall cabinets in the basement are actually from Ikea and were installed years ago. Narrower upper cabinets rest on the butcher block counter top of the deeper bottom cabinets. Due to the lower height of the ceiling and overhead plumbing in the basement, it makes sense to organize the cabinets this way. There are 4 double door cabinets on each the top and the bottom. As a result, the countertop is not deep, but it provides enough surface to load and unload the dishes.

Smart China Storage Ideas

The sky’s the limit when it comes to containers that can help you figure out how to store china safely. You can purchase both hard- and soft-sided cases for your plates, bowls and tea settings. For my dishes, I like to get the soft, padded cases that zipper close to protect my dishes.

Hagerty has a nice collection of plate savers and my most recent purchase is this set of 4 in blue. The set fits 4 different sizes (7″, 8″, 9″, and 11 1/2″), which works well for most dinner and salad plates. I use the smaller sizes for small soup bowls or odd items. In addition, this set comes with inserts to put between your plates.

In between each plate I put the dividers which can be made from felt or packing material. This helps prevent chipping and the plates from sliding.

Labeling and Identifying

Since I have over 50 containers of dishes/glasses, it would be a small nightmare to unzip and look in every container to find the dishes I want to use. On each container, I create a tag with a color copy print of the item inside.

Once I cut out the photo, I glue it to a small card stock tag using Elmer’s Glue stick. You can buy the tags or I just use index cards cut to size (actually I have used both). With a hole punch and a piece of string, I can attach the tag to the case.

On the back of the tag, I will indicate the number of dishes in the case~for example, 8 salad plates.

This decorative twine holder with scissors has a permanent place in my kitchen as it is so handy and attractive. The scissors are conveniently attached, too. Each tag gets a piece of twine.

With strings on all the tags, I can now label each container. I tie the string onto the hole in the zipper slider. This system makes identification of the type of dish and quantity available very simple and easy.

When planning to entertain, I first determine how many people, then go and see what dishes I want to use. Dishes and glassware are already clean so no dusting or re-washing is involved.

What About Cups, Glasses and Stemware?

There are many different style containers and I have a few that I use for my vintage stemware and finer coffee mugs.

There are padded cases for stemware storage where you can safely put 12 glasses in the same container. Investing in good storage containers is well worth protecting my cherished pieces.

Overall, I am happy with this system. All the seasonal and special dinnerware is in one place. Sometimes I moan that I need to go up and down the basement stairs, but it is another form of exercise, I suppose. If you don’t use it, you lose it, right?

How do you store your fine dinnerware and china? I’m always looking for new ideas that will improve my current system so please share what you are doing for this type of storage.