Easy Home Organization: The Kitchen
A well-ordered kitchen doesn’t happen by accident. You need to be willing to make changes and break bad habits in order to cultivate the neat, organized cooking space that you’ve always wanted. If you’re ready to embrace a new way of kitchen life, here are just a few tips for easy home organization.
1. Buy Kitchen Risers
Kitchen risers will give you twice the amount of usable space in cabinets and cupboards. They’re basically portable shelves that don’t have to be assembled or installed, and some even come with individual partitions to help you separate plates, bowls and cutlery. Now that’s efficiency!
2. Label Everything
Instead of prying open old jars with a twitching nose and a sense of foreboding, stick labels on everything in your cupboard. It doesn’t matter if they’re sauce bottles or plastic containers filled with uncooked pasta; if you’re putting them away for a rainy day, apply sticky labels with descriptions of their contents. You’ll appreciate the effort in the long run.
3. Hang It Up
If you’re anything like most people, there’s a lot of wall space you aren’t using in your kitchen. But think of all the ways you could be taking advantage of your vertical space!
- Hooks for aprons and oven mitts
- Shelves for jars, jugs, cans, bottles, and baskets
- A dry-erase board for recipes and reminders
- A pegboard for hanging cooking utensils
4. Put Your Cooking Utensils in Jars
It’s all too easy to lose your spatula in a drawer full of spoons, tongs, and whisks. A better storage option is putting them all in plain sight on top of the counter, especially if you divide them into separate jars. For example, you can have a spatula jar, a ladle jar and a jar just for measuring spoons. Not only will this look better, but it will also encourage you to put everything back in the right spot when you’re done.
5. Spin It Right Round, Baby, Right Round
Lazy Susans are some of the best organizational tools of the 21st century. Instead of packing and stacking food so tightly into your cupboards that you can’t even make out their brand names, a Lazy Susan will let you spin them until you can find what you need. It’s a round peg in a square hole, but it works.
6. Squeeze Storage Racks Into Unlikely Places
Does your refrigerator have a few inches between the wall and the side? Slide a pull-out shelf rack into the gap that you can hide when not in use. Are there big, sturdy doors on your cupboards? Hang a few hooks on their interior walls to take advantage of that empty space.
7. Hide Items That You Never Use
It’s perfectly understandable if you have a sentimental attachment to the blender that you got for your first wedding anniversary. However, if you haven’t touched the machine in years, it’s not doing anything on your countertop but taking up space. Hide your rarely-used items in closets and cupboards to decrease the amount of clutter in your kitchen.
8. Put Fruits and Veggies in a Caddy
For produce that doesn’t have to be refrigerated, a hanging shower caddy will keep it neat and presentable. You can hang the caddy anywhere there’s an edge, so your options are pretty much limitless. Best of all, with your fruits and veggies in plain sight, you’ll never forget them and let them accidentally go bad!
Say goodbye to cluttered kitchens filled with junk. These tips might seem simple, but if you use them diligently and intelligently, you’ll be amazed at how much you can increase the efficiency of your kitchen.
