6 Genius Tips to Organize Your Kitchen and Maximize Space | A Complete Guide
The kitchen is the busiest room in the house, so keeping this living space clean and tidy spares you from frustration. However, it can quickly become chaotic if you don’t know how to organize your kitchen and maintain its orderliness. Use these tips to keep your hardworking area neat and functional.
P.S. If you want to learn how to organize your kitchen, I have this FREE guide to help. In the guide I’m sharing Tidied by K’s exact process, our go to organizing products and so much more. Download the guide to get started.
The kitchen is often the heart of the home, but it can quickly become chaotic without proper organization. From meal prepping to family activities, keeping this busy space neat and functional is key to maintaining order in your household. In this complete guide, we’ll explore six smart strategies to help you organize your kitchen efficiently.
By implementing these tips, you can transform your kitchen into a more organized, stress-free space that caters to your daily needs.
Here are 6 simple ways to organize your kitchen and create a more functional space.
1. Think In Zones
Organizing the kitchen can be satisfying but laborious. This space usually contains more stuff than any other room, and sorting out its contents in one go can be overwhelming.
Dedicate a day or weekend to this project if you have the time, energy and bandwidth. Otherwise, do it in phases to see progress immediately without exhausting yourself.
You can prioritize food storage and experiment with various ideas to organize your pantry — like using clear, airtight containers to keep pests at bay — before moving on to meal prep and cooking equipment, kitchenware and serving pieces, countertops, walls and the floor, and so on.
2. Declutter With Abandon
Have all of your chosen zone’s contents in view to determine which ones to keep or toss. Forgotten bags of chips, buried boxes of candy and piles of faded documents occupy space without you realizing it, creating a false impression that your kitchen has less storage capacity.
After pulling everything out, decide whether to keep, recycle, sell, donate, throw away and return the items to their proper spot. Be honest with yourself and retain the ones you’ll realistically use or consume. If you’d like more tips on how to declutter your kitchen to free up space, I share top tips on how to do just that, here.
Give anything valuable but unfit for consumption or use a new lease on life. Recycling yards may accept overused plastic containers, broken appliances, and damaged electronics. Composting suitable organic materials keeps them from aggravating various environmental problems, like expanding landfill space.
Sell or donate your unwanted kitchen items in good condition. Discard the objects that don’t fit in the other categories.
3. Place Items With Foresight
Before you put things back in storage or display, ensure there’s logic in their placement based on how you use them.
For example, grouping your coffee machine and supplies in one corner instead of storing your beans in the pantry makes brewing more efficient. Storing utensils, glasses and plates near your dishwasher makes unloading more convenient.
When it comes to appliances, you might not have enough countertop space to keep them all out. If you need to store some in cabinets, make sure to choose wisely. Something you use every day, like your toaster, should stay on the counter. Appliances you only use occasionally, like a waffle iron, can be stored and pulled out when you need them.
4. Think about How Your Space Is Used
The kitchen is often the heart of the home. The kitchen counter may be where you drop your mail and organize paperwork. The table may be a homework station or the family game night spot. No matter what you do in the kitchen, you should set up the room to be functional for you and your family.
Children often benefit from doing homework in a shared family space like the kitchen, where they can ask questions with their parents in the room. To make sure they’ll be productive in the kitchen, dedicate some drawers to storing school supplies so they don’t have to leave the room to find what they need.
If you struggle to keep clutter, like mail, off the counter, set up a paper station in the kitchen. It could be as simple as an inbox on the counter where you can drop mail when you walk in.
Instead of trying to change the way you use the kitchen, change the way your kitchen is organized so it fits your lifestyle.
5. Keep Seasonal Stuff Elsewhere
An organized kitchen should only have the essentials — items you may need at home any day.
Camping cooking equipment is an excellent case in point. Although it technically involves food, it’s for outdoor use and has nothing to do with your kitchen. Your cast iron skillet, portable grill or stove, soft cooler and other gear you need to prepare meals in the great outdoors should stay in the garage or self-storage unit instead.
Another example is emergency supplies. Many preppers store nonperishable food their families need for at least three days — as recommended by the authorities. These items take several years to expire, so they tend to sit on the shelves for a long time and compete with everyday kitchen staples for space. For this reason, emergency supplies kits merit a separate pantry.
Seasonal kitchen decor should be on spare closet shelves, attic or basement, not the kitchen. Storing holiday-themed cookie cutters, mittens, and towels elsewhere is an effortless solution to kitchen drawer organization problems.
This next-level decluttering should make your kitchen more spacious and conducive to home maintenance, like routine plumbing inspections.
6. Use Organizational Tools & Supplies
Even minimalist kitchens need all the bells and whistles to stay spotless and orderly. Study your space’s layout, note its limitations and address them with supplementary products to hold more items without making a mess.
The market has no shortage of ingenious kitchen tool storage solutions, ranging from under-cabinet utensil hanger hooks to multilayer rotatable racks.
Before you buy anything though, measure your space and make sure something will be useful. It can be fun to scroll through Amazon and add every organizational tool to your cart. However, that will definitely just add more clutter to your kitchen.
Focus on your problem areas. If you struggle to find the right utensils in disorganized drawers, start by buying drawer organizers. If you have no space in your cabinets for organizational racks, try finding countertop or over-the-door organizers to make use of other spaces. Don’t buy anything that won’t make your life easier.
Knowing How to Organize Your Kitchen Is Half the Battle
The kitchen is the heart of the house. Although embracing these tips can meaningfully revamp your space, you must reevaluate all zones regularly to control clutter and keep them organized.
In this blog, you learned 6 effective tips to organize your kitchen and keep it clutter-free.
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