I’m sorry to come late to such a vital thread.
We’ve got a silverware drawer, which we use for breakfast, lunch and deserts, and small forks needed for cooking. From left to right it is spoons, knives, (table,) forks, then metal handled steak knives, then wooden handled steak knives. In the slot in front, perpendicular to these goes the spoons I have reserved for putting sugar in my coffee and eating ice cream.
But for dinner we use silverware from a wooden silverware case, with table knives on the back, regular forks, salad forks, spoons, soup spoons, butter knives (little things) and then two slots for serving utensils.
Not being barbarians we do place settings. Place mat, then napkin and fork on the left of the plate, spoon, and table knife on the right, with a metal steak knife if needed.
For the dishwasher, the silverware in the box goes in front, and the silverware in the drawer goes in back, since that makes unloading easier.
The good silverware is in the dry sink in boxes, inherited from various parents. I have no idea of the order, we wouldn’t open it without a climate scientist to sample air from ancient times.
The “good” silver. I have some of that, inherited from my mother through her father, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother. I know this because there are initials etched into some of the spoons, along with dates. There isn’t much of it left, as most of it was sold during the Great Depression. It’s mostly silver serving spoons, an extensive set of butter knives, and a bunch of silver souvenir spoons dating back to the late 1800s. All of these are kept in cloth rollups that help retard tarnishing. There are a few of the serving spoons that are used for specific items and nothing else, goddammit! There is a large seashell type spoon that is only for mashed potatoes, and another more traditionally shaped one that is only for stuffing. One of the odder pieces was always used for canned cranberry sauce. My wife informs me that this piece, which is round and about 2-1/2" across and full of holes is actually for sifting powdered sugar on top of baked goods to provide an attractive design. These pieces are brought out every Thanksgiving, then rolled back up and stored in a drawer in the credenza. I’m trying to foist them off on my kids.
I believe it’s time for photos of flatware/cutlery drawers.
Those of us with really good manual dexterity can juggle our entire place setting, keeping it all in the air at once. The best of us can do this while standing on our head.
However, when I sit down to dinner my objective is to eat it, and to do so in the most straightforward and tasteful way possible, not to put on a circus act. I suppose if you get really good at this switching around of knife and fork, you might be able to throw them from one hand to the other, simultaneously catching both in a sort of mini-juggling act repeated after every mouthful. Meanwhile I’ll be the one at the table just quietly eating my dinner.
I mean, speaking of manual dexterity, how hard is it (for a right-handed person) to cut something with the knife in the left hand? You’re cutting a piece of meat, not sculpting the Venus de Milo.
I have spoken.
And @Chefguy, who one would presume from his name knows a thing or two about food, agrees with me.
Humoring you. Humoring.
So, you’re hinting at an admission that you’re one of those dinner-table juggling acts? That instead of eating your dinner like a civilized person, your preference is to perform conjuring tricks with the silverware? Nah, I think you’re better than that.
Or the opposite, as my ex is a leftie.
Ask her if her eggs are easy over what? Toast? Lobster Thermador? Enquiring minds want to know. To me, it appears it was the chicken that was easy. Ask the rooster, he may know the answer.
I simply place items into the slot which is emptiest after washing and drying, why bother to separate categories of utensil at all? I can eat steak with a spoon, and I have personally witnessed (but not mastered) a sushi chef eating ice-cream with chopsticks.
He was probably showing off.
I can eat ice-cream with chopsticks, it’s kinda like noodles, you just shovel it in. I have never been able to master squeezing a lemon slice into my drink one-handed with them though.
Yes, she was showing off, she would do it without even looking while pretending to be trying to teach me how.
Mine has the slots shaped for the utensils; in particular spoon slots shaped for the spoons. If I turned it around in order to get the smaller (and rather odd-shaped) compartment at the front, the handles on at least the spoons would have to be at the back, and I’d wind up grabbing them by the bowls instead of by the handles.
So I suppose we don’t have the same on in reverse after all.
Well, that was exhausting.
The only problem we have with silver ware is making sure that large spoons and small ones don’t end up in the same slot.
But our biggest dispute was putting drinking glasses back in the cupboard. Open end up or down?
Both, unless they’re perfect cylinders, in which case you’re on your own.
Open end up is the cleanest. It avoids the open end touching the surface of the shelf. They won’t get dusty in a closed cupboard.
Who is to say which way glasses should be stored? I am. If glasses aren’t stable in the upright position in which they’re actually used, you shouldn’t be using them.
Mine are wider at the top than at the bottom. To maximize the storage space I have, I alternate them top up next to bottom up so they nest.
I hate to admit it, but in the circumstances you describe, that actually makes sense. Seems like unusual circumstances, though. My glassware is a combination of glasses of different shapes and sizes and some matched glasses, and there would be little or no space saving through such intricate nesting.
I deal with space constraints by storing little-used glassware elsewhere, outside the kitchen. So the stuff immediately at hand is the stuff used 99% of the time. Just because I’m high-entropy and low-energy doesn’t mean I’m stupid! Being basically lazy, I’m actually a model of efficiency! 
Good luck with that. I understand that silverware, and especially china, is a drug on the market since kids don’t want them. Especially china, since who has formal dinner parties and they don’t go in the dishwasher.
I figure they’re going to stay in our dry sink until we go, and then the kids can figure out what to do with them.
Meh, I value my real silver silverware because it was a wedding gift from my older brother and his wife. That fact that it’s very rarely used is irrelevant. It’s not as if the elegant cherrywood box it came in takes up a lot of space.
As for fine china, it’s debatable whether I have any. I have some ordinary old china for everyday use. For more formal occasions, I have a whole set of Royal Doulton china including serving plates, a tea service, gravy boat, and more. It has an interesting origin. At one time, various supermarket chains were offering chinaware as perks. Most of it was crap, but one chain in particular had a big selection of beautiful Royal Doulton, the general motif being pure white but with a subtle seashell texture on the rim. It wasn’t free, but you were allowed to buy a set amount for a very low price according to the amount of your grocery purchase. I went all-out and amassed a pretty big collection during the period of the offer. This was decades ago but to this day I’m glad I made the effort. It’s very elegant stuff and was acquired at very low cost. One of those rare opportunities.
I sent the collected plates that also came through my mother via another ancestor to my kids some years ago. I’m sure they don’t thank me for them, but there is actually an appraised value for each plate, which were estimated at about $500 each. I’m reasonably certain that they are either languishing in a number of closets, in boxes in garages, or in a landfill somewhere. Nothing I can do about any of that, so my only other option is to quit caring about any of it.
If they were given to us, I might feel more attachment to them, but they were not wedding presents for us or for my parents - who got married during the Depression and whose ceremony was shall we say modest.