An Organized Kitchen: Tips for keeping your kitchen neat and tidy!

The kitchen is arguably one of, if not the most important rooms of your home.  It is also a space that can easily get messy, unorganized and so easily cluttered with, well pretty much anything!  Wondering what you can do to ease the frustration of a messy kitchen?  Check out this list of ideas for organizing the heart of your home!

• Opposites don’t really attract, especially in your kitchen!  Keep like things together; dishes with dishes, food with food, canned goods with canned goods, utensils (yes you guessed it!) with utensils.
• Does it really belong in a kitchen?  If you look in your pantry or kitchen cupboards and find light bulbs, screw drivers and tape measures something isn’t quite right.  Most of us have enough kitchen possessions to fill more than the cupboards and drawers we have, so move those items to a more appropriate (and less used!) space.
• Purge!  If you really need those 5 pepper mills keep them but if you only use one, get rid of the rest.  Also keep in mind, if you haven’t used something for a couple of years, there is a really good chance you really don’t need it!
• Drawer space is precious, think hooks.  Really, what else are you doing with the back of the cupboard doors?  Why not consider using hooks inside these spaces to hang things like oven mitts, pot holders, dish towels or even measuring cups.  If you have a large pantry door use a hook inside to hang longer things like brooms or aprons.

.

• Store your pots near the stove and your glasses near the dishwasher!  Think about it, do you really need (or for that matter want) your glassware close to you when you’re cooking up a storm?
• Base cabinets = a great place for pull out shelves.  Really they make a huge difference by making contents much more accessible.
• If you use it, make sure you can get it!  We all have items in our kitchens that we don’t necessarily use everyday (things like marble serving platters and fine china) so store those things in the harder to reach areas (higher cabinets and the back of cupboards) and make sure to keep everyday items (things like daily use dinnerware and coffee cups) in the easy to reach areas.
• Rack ’em up!  Racks are a great way to store things like pot lids, baking sheets and (well) anything thin and tall!

 

.

• Organize those cooking utensils!  Either store them neatly on the counter in a ceramic jar, crock or some sort of urn or consider customizing your drawers with utensil inserts.

 

.

• Create your own cookbook.  Keep your recipes organized (and handy!) by storing them in a three-ring binder or recipe box.
• Make sure to have a convenient place for garbage, recycling and compostables!  Consider purchasing a garbage bin that allows for all three items in one, or even two of the three.  I recently purchased this little gem below at IQ Living in Toronto, it’s an over the sink compost bin and makes cleaning as you go so much easier.

 

.