Properly organizing your kitchen is one of the fundamentals of good housekeeping. With a well-organized kitchen, cooking becomes efficient, fun, and safe. Many of the things that can go wrong in the kitchen are closely related to poor organization. If you are unable to find what you need when cooking, then this will not only spoil whatever you were intending to cook, but forgotten foodstuffs lost at the back of cupboards can soon begin to rot, go off, spoil, or smell. And if your kitchen is always a pain to clean, then this is almost certainly also related to poor organization.
Properly organizing your kitchen isn’t normally difficult, but there’s certainly a knack to it. How you go about organizing your kitchen will naturally depend on how large your kitchen is, what storage space you have open to you, and what you would like to prioritize within that storage space. Precisely how you go about the task will vary, but there are some fundamentals underpinning it too.
Kitchen Things and Other Things
Depending on how much available space you actually have, you may ultimately find yourself having to decide what actually goes in the kitchen and what doesn’t. This is not always the most obvious thing in the world. Clearly, foodstuffs and pots and pans belong in the kitchen; but what about, say, the shoe deodorizer and window cleaner sprays? In this case, you might want to keep all your cleaning products together and store these with all the rest that you actually do use in the kitchen. On the other hand, you might keep these under the stairs or in a separate cupboard, seeing as the Windex or the ShoeFresh aren’t really “kitchen things”.
This is what you should think about when organizing your kitchen. Some questions to ask yourself might be, “how much fridge space do I have?” or “what items do I want to display attractively and close to hand?”
Top Tips for Kitchen Organization
So, keeping in mind that every kitchen is different and that every different space will be – of course – organized differently, here follows some useful general tips which you should be able to apply in all cases:
Make Use of Double-Duty Shelves
Even if you have a large kitchen, economizing space is still a great idea and will be a cornerstone of many of the tips here. A double-duty shelf is a great space saving installation. Attractive crockery and seasonal dishes can be proudly displayed along the top, and you can hang things like chopping boards and oven mitts from the hooks underneath.
Keep Height in Mind
What we mean by this is that you should always consider what items are best stored high up and which ones are preferable low down. If you have children, then this question pretty much answers itself. Perishable foodstuffs that could attract pests are also better stored high up.
Use Clear Canisters
When filled with everything from cereals to pastas and baking ingredients, clear canisters can make for a very pretty display. It will also help you to have these ingredients easy to spot and close to hand.
Use Inserts to Economize Drawer Space
Stacking things on top of one another not only looks pretty messy, but it is also a very inefficient way to store things in drawers. By making use of a few drawer dividers, you can easily solve this problem.
In the end, kitchen organization is a personal endeavor. There are few fundamentals to follow and tips for saving space but, at the end of the day, it is your kitchen and that is what it should look like.