Let’s be honest with ourselves, our kitchen cabinets are a mess. You don’t really think about what you’re putting where and you find things in the strangest of places when you really need them. Whether it’s pots and pans or knives or Tupperware, you won’t find things when you actually need to.
A few more reasons to organize your kitchen cabinets include:
- Saving money from not having to buy duplicates
- Saving time because you’ll know where everything is
- Making grocery shopping easier for yourself as well as making meal plans since your cabinets contain everything in its place
- All the measuring instruments will be in places that you need them to be when the time to cook comes up
- Saving time since your family members and guests will all be able to find things they need
- Making cleaning easier on yourself since you won’t have to group things together every single time you do
To change that, there are a few things that you can do around your kitchen cabinets to better organize them. They’re not really very manually intensive so you’ll find that it’s easy to organize your cabinets on the go depending on how much stuff you have.
1. Declutter Kitchen Cabinets
The first thing you need to do to organize your cabinets is to take everything out and organize them by type of utensil, cutlery, or item.
Make sure that you put the most similar items together so that you can decide where you can group them.
You can even play around with organization since everyone has different preferences to use their utensils. Some are more enamored of baking while others love to barbeque or fry up some chicken wings.
Others may love to live a simpler lifestyle or go vegan or vegetarian. All these different lifestyles can mean your kitchen will have different items and different types of food. Hence, you need to organize depending on your needs.
2. Throw Out Things You Don’t Need
You may have bought something on impulse or just thought something looked great when it had no functional value at all. If you continue to do this, you’ll only take up space in the kitchen and that’s not supposed to happen in a place where free movement shouldn’t be prohibited at all.
By getting rid of duplicates and excess plates, forks, knives and even towels that you don’t need, you’ll be doing yourself a favor.
3. Place Items Close To Where They’re Used Most
Place dishes close to the dishwasher, the forks and knives and spoons to the sink and the baking ingredients closer to the oven. It’s imperative that you put things closer to where they’ll be needed since that’ll improve efficiency more than naught. It’ll shave seconds and then minutes off your cooking game and make the entire experience of being in the kitchen more efficient.
4. Maintain Organization through forcing a habit
If you don’t force yourself to keep putting things away where you found them, this entire exercise will be for naught. Don’t be lazy and put a spoon where the forks are supposed to be or a towel where the linens are supposed to be.
Maintaining the structure will ensure that you find everything where it’s supposed to be every time you reach for it, which is the point of the organizational exercise in the first place.
5. Get Organizational Containers
There’s a lot of space inside a kitchen cabinet but it’s not divided specifically so that you can stack different instruments or towels or tools efficiently. Getting plastic containers for food and for instruments will help you better organize them. It’ll also be a much more efficient use of space rather than just placing them outside.
The items you place inside will also be more stackable than out in the open space since they’ll be confined to their own small corners. Not only will you save space, but make better use of it.
6. Get a Magnetic Kitchen Organization Rack
There are times when you find things that just don’t go anywhere, or when you have things that are so useful that putting them away doesn’t make sense since you’re going to use them again in a while anyway.
Things like towels, scissors, knives and even cookbooks that are needed several times a day need to be within reach. Hence, getting a magnetic kitchen organization rack will help you be in arm’s reach of them whenever you enter the kitchen.
7. Get a Stackable Drawer Organizer
Getting these kinds of drawers can give you an easier way to organize your cutlery. It’s often that we don’t have the tact to organize instruments like cutlery into their own small corners so getting a drawer that is literally split up into squares and rectangles that can serve as organizers will help you to put away cutlery in specific places.
This way you’ll be able to find what you need faster and faster every time you open the drawer. Remember to put back the utensils and cutlery where you picked them up from so that you can keep taking advantage of this organizational tool.
Decluttering and organizing your kitchen will help you live a more efficient life and will help you appreciate what a well-organized kitchen can do for your overall cooking routine.
Do you have ideas for decluttering your kitchen? Let me know in the comments below.
Rhonda grew up with parents who gardened, hunted, fished, canned, and preserved food. Her mother was a professional cook and Rhonda credits her teaching everything from how to make homemade biscuits and gravy to what kind of meals to serve for different occasions. In the kitchen, Rhonda uses a mix of old-fashioned country cooking and up-to-date fads in the kitchen, often experimenting with replacing higher-calorie or fat ingredients with healthier options that still retain the delicious flavors of the originals.