Organizing an old kitchen and tiny closets - any ideas?

Hi all,
After living in this old house for almost 4 years, it suddenly occurred to me the other day that when we moved in, I had arranged the dishes/glassware and our pantry area (w/non perishable food) - backwards of what would have been the most efficient operation. Hmmmm, who knew?

I have no idea why it didn't occur to me earlier that we were tripping over ourselves moving dishes from the dishwasher and carrying them to the other side of the sink to the dish cupboard, and we were carrying food stored in the faraway pantry area all the way across the kitchen to the stove - but there you go. All I can say is....duh.

This morning I rectified that and switched them. Of course the problem is Tim and I are so used to the old inefficient way, we keep expecting to find the coffee cups near the sink instead of just above the coffeepot, and I still look for the spices near the dishwasher instead of the one closest to the stove. :0)

Of course even with the new arrangement, since there are absolutely NO cabinets near our stove, we still have a bit of a walk from the closest pantry cabinet to get to the stove, and with the current outlets and cabinetry, there is no way to change that without renovating. We've decided not to make any major renovations until we complete some much-needed exterior upgrades, so I'm looking for ideas on how to "make do" with what we have and just make it more livable - hence this post.

Any ideas for the kitchen?
I'm looking for ideas on how to easily and affordably add some type of cabinetry near the stove to "make do" with the current arrangement. While I don't expect to have a full pantry there for now, it would be great to add something either next to the stove (but it is a very small and narrow space), or perhaps above the stove (there's nothing above the stove now including no vent - the stove just sort of sits by itself next to the fridge - not pretty). Adding some small cabinet would at least allow us to store our spices, oils and other items that are used only at the stove (not to mention pot holders and other important items).

I've thought of those inexpensive cabinets at Home Depot or other places that hopefully we could install ourselves above, but I wondered if anyone had any other ideas? I'm always open to new and "creative" ideas (out of the box, so to speak), so if anyone has another suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Any ideas for tiny closets?
Problem #2 is that we have NO closet space. Imagine if you're only closet was the width of one single panel door - that's two of our three upstairs closets. The one closet of any decent size is - wouldn't you know it - in the tiniest room which we use as our home office (since we both work from home and Tim has only a home office when he's not traveling, it is used regularly). So currently he has the closet in the office (he gets the bigger one since he has the walk), and I use the one in our bedroom, with the one in the guest room used for clothes stored for the opposite season. As I'm sure you've noticed if you've seen what I wear, I'm not much into the wardrobe thing anyway, so since I don't have that many clothes I've been able to make do with 2 very tiny closets for everything.

But I'd like to stop relying on the guest bedroom to leave that closet open for guests - because it's getting cumbersome to find another place for the clothes in that closet when we have guests. I'm hoping to go to the Container Store in Mass which I hear is awesome - maybe I'll get some ideas there. We have some extra room in our bedroom for an "external" closet organizer, and ideally I'd like to find something that hangs from the ceiling or wall to leave the floor space below open for the dogs who lay there. Ideas anyone?

Thanks! cy