31 Days of Organizing Tips: Day 12 (Kitchen)

Welcome to Day Twelve of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series! Throughout this series I’m sharing organizing tips to help you on your journey from overwhelmed to organized.

Today’s tips are about organizing your kitchen. We’ve already looked at organizing your pantry and your refrigerator, which are important elements of your kitchen. Today I’ll give some tips for other parts of your kitchen and summarize why it’s important to keep your kitchen organized.

Your kitchen is often the hub of your family life.  You prepare meals there, eat there, do homework there, create art projects there, and countless other things.  Sometimes kitchens take a lot of abuse.  They also can become the dumping ground for anything that comes into the house or for things that don’t have a specific place to go.  Counters, tables, and other surfaces become easily cluttered.

So, having an organized kitchen will hopefully help you stay on top of things, so you are less overwhelmed and can enjoy spending more time with your family in your kitchen!

A lot of general organizing tips that I’ve already mentioned in this series apply in the kitchen.  Grouping like items is very important, as is using containers to organize.  And, of course, don’t forget to de-clutter when you organize your kitchen!  Kitchens are a magnet for stuff we don’t really need, use, or love.

As you start organizing your kitchen, consider the following:

• Where you use things – e.g. spices and cooking utensils near the stove or dishes and glasses near the dishwasher
• What items you use together (store them together if possible) – e.g. coffee, mugs, and coffee maker close to each other, or mixer, mixing bowls, and attachments together)
• How often you use items – keep frequently used things in central locations but don’t take up “prime real estate” in your kitchen for things you don’t use very often – if you have space in your basement or garage, you could set up a “kitchen overflow” area with items you only use a few times a year to create more space in your kitchen for everyday items

Here are some specific tips on how you can organize various parts of your kitchen:

1.  Use a vertical organizer to store your bakeware, fry pans and cutting boards. This is better than stacking them because you don’t have to move all of them when you want to use (or put back) the one on the bottom. It saves a LOT of frustration! Here they are in use in a client’s kitchen.

2.  Or, you can screw a bakeware organizer into your cabinet horizontally to separate these items. You can use these for lids too.

3.  If you have a tall space between shelves and can’t adjust them, use under-the-shelf baskets or stand-alone shelves to maximize that space without having to stack items. I use these for plates in my cabinets and have used them in clients’ kitchens for years. They save so much space! You can get all kinds of different ones now.

4.  If you have a kitchen “junk drawer”, you can keep it organized by grouping like items.  You can purchase drawer organizers, dividers, and trays from nearly anywhere (including office supply stores and dollar stores). Or you can make your own by re-purposing plastic food containers, cardboard boxes or lids, or adding wooden dividers.

Ten ways to organize the small stuff

5.  Utensil drawers work the same way. Instead of having one big drawer with utensils floating around in it, group items and put them into containers or utensil organizers. Here’s how I organized my utensils.

Please remember to pin from the original source for all these fantastic pictures!  

Update: If you’d like more kitchen organizing ideas, I’ve got a whole series of posts on kitchen organizing tips and you can see how I organized my kitchen.

For Day Twelve, organize the part of your kitchen that bothers you the most.  Or spend some time evaluating what works and what doesn’t work in your kitchen and put together a plan for how to organize it better so it works for you.  Kitchens are unique so don’t feel overwhelmed with all the amazing ideas out there.  Figure out your needs and organize your space to suit you!

What do you think is the greatest benefit of organizing your kitchen?  What’s the best organizing tip you’ve implemented?

If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else. 

Happy organizing!