The kitchen is the most used space in the home. This makes it necessary to have systems put in place to avoid a mess.
An organized kitchen allows you to cook more efficiently, clean up quickly, and find everything you need instantly.
The need for functionality especially with limited spaces to say the list is paramount. More often than not, we want the entire set of essentials accessible but neatly tucked out of sight.
To say that limited storage and working space is a challenge in most if not most of the kitchens would be too far off the mark. Use these tips and tricks to enhance your cooking time for you and your household.
1. Clean out the cabinets
When you take the leap and decide to organize your kitchen, start off by emptying all the cabinets.
Go through all of the stuff in there to determine what you can keep, discard, or donate. Only keep what has been used in recent months checking also for duplicate essentials taking up space.
2. Grouping like items
After deciding on the essentials to keep, take your organizing further by grouping all like items together.
Consider what works best for you and your space. For example, you could group all the baking essentials together, a different pile for your spices and oils, and another for your utensils. Utensils can further be grouped into:
- What is used on a day-to-day basis
- Glassware
- Holiday/ seasonal items
- Special occasions ware
3. Organizing your cabinets
Crunch time comes when determining how to arrange and allocate different items in your cabinets.
More often than not, the space available cannot sufficiently store all that we need. Using these tips, however, will help you get the most out of the space available.
- Cooking and baking pieces should be closest to the preparation area.
- Utensils including pots and pans should be close to the preparation area as well.
- Glassware could work best close to the sink or the refrigerator.
You could also set apart some small areas dedicated exclusively to coffee or tea preparation. Here, you would place the coffee-making machine, sugar, your favorite mugs, and strainers.
This puts everything you need for your morning tea or coffee at a central point and you can avoid making multiple rounds around the kitchen in the morning.
4. Storing jars
The practicality brought by storing jars can be compared to no other. By aligning transparent jars in your cabinets, you can easily group like essentials for ease of access.
This also prevents the scattering of the tiny kitchen essentials may it be the measuring spoons or small sauce mixes.
5. Pair containers and lids
As you go through the cabinets, identify containers without a lid. Often, the usability of the lidless containers in the kitchen is minimal and as such, you could discard these or repurpose them within the house.
You could choose to have the lids on their respective containers or group all lids together in a container.
The same should be applied to your pans and pots whereby you could store the lids on a wire rack near your stove.
Having organized all of your cabinet space, the following tricks will guide you on how to use any of the tiny spare spaces left.
- Using small-lidded containers for small essential
Rubber bands twist ties, strings, and other miscellaneous hardware could be neatly placed in cheap lidded containers to avoid misplacement.
- Using flatware organizers
Long skinny tools can present a challenge during their storage. That is where the flatware organizers come in. Group all your straws, chopsticks, and plastic tableware and tuck them away in the organizers.
- Use magazine holders to hold chopping blocks
This is a cheaper alternative to the $50+ cutting board racks and works just as efficiently. For five bucks, you can get the magazine holder from the hardware stores and use 3M hooks, you could easily hook it on the inside of your cabinets and you’ll have a rack for your blocks.
- Use adhesive and hooks for hanging Now that you are out of cabinet space, use adhesive and removable hooks inside the cabinets to hand pans, pots, and other similar essentials. 3M hooks on the inside of your door can be installed to hang aprons and shopping bags for an overall cleaner look.
Now that you are out of cabinet space, use adhesive and removable hooks inside the cabinets to hand pans, pots, and other similar essentials. 3M hooks on the inside of your door can be installed to hang aprons and shopping bags for an overall cleaner look.
Simple solutions can easily transform your life in the kitchen into something better and more efficient.
The power to find things much more easily has been placed within your hands with these simple tips and tricks.
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