How to Organize Your Kitchen
Do you wonder how other people organize their kitchen? I especially wondered how to organize my kitchen when I recklessly and repeatedly shoved my falling Tupperware Snapware back into the cupboard. Tyler and I both like our kitchen to be clean and organized. Actually, it might be the only room he likes to keep clean. 🙂 It’s the first room we fully enter after a long day of work and the room we naturally gravitate to when we’re hungry.
When we remodeled our kitchen and received lots of new kitchen items for our wedding (THANK YOU friends & fam!), we had the perfect opportunity to organize our kitchen. Although the remodel disorganized our house, it made reorganizing it a heck of a lot easier. Below you can see how we organized our kitchen. What’s your most frustrating thing to organize in the kitchen?
First, the boring pantry. Then on to the good stuff!
We used to keep the alcohol downstairs. Besides wine, we don’t have that many bottles so we stashed them in this small cabinet above our custom wine rack. This also holds wine bottle openers, drink mixes, ground coffee, cookies… basically all of the sinful items.
Our Noritake dishes are in the corner cabinet, above the sink and dishwasher. This makes putting things away really easy because the most often used pieces are close to the dishwasher. Not pictured on the bottom is another corner lazy Susan that holds our glass cook ware and metal pans.
Our kitchen is small, so we don’t have a lot of extra drawer space. However, we do have a large foyer that we haven’t mastered. So, I hauled a three drawer filing cabinet upstairs to house our pens, paper, stamps, etc. rather than using precious kitchen real estate for junk drawers.
We don’t bake often, so that stuff immediately went to the top shelf. Our previous kitchen had a soffit (aka dead space) so we did gain more room by replacing it with long cabinets. The only hard to reach items are in the back of the deep cabinets above the fridge and in the corner space.
We moved the plastic storage tubs to the top cabinet (rather than the bottom) because it was always so hard to find matching pieces and we didn’t have a good place for out flat items (pizza stone, cookie sheet, cutting board).
Our Anolon pans had to be close to the oven for easy access. They are amazing, by the way! Great to cook with and easy to clean.
This past weekend I visited my brother and sister-in-law because they just welcomed a new baby girl into their family! If you thought we were crazy for having someone remodel our kitchen while planning a wedding, listen to this. My brother remodeled his kitchen (he actually did it himself on nights and weekends) while my sister-in-law was pregnant! I admire them both a ton! I think that would have stressed me out. I saw his beautiful kitchen this weekend too. It’s so well done I may have to blog about it. 🙂
Every layout is a little different. If you are still wondering how to organize your kitchen, see how Classy Clutter organized their spice cabinet with a measuring chart, or How to Nest for Less’ kitchen, where I saw the ingenious idea to label a photo of your kitchen before putting everything away.
Never put heavy or glass items above shoulder level. I permanent nerve damage and zinging thumb pain after glass bakeware slipped from my grip and sliced my thumb resulting in excessive blood loss and stitches.
Never put frequently used items in low spaces to prevent unnecessary cumulative back pain.
Never put cleaning supplies under sink in any residence where children or pets might ever visit.. Children can master child locks sooner and quicker than you think.
These are great tips! Thank you for sharing. I’m so sorry to hear about your thumb being sliced though. That sounds awful.
Where do you keep your cleaning supplies that the children can’t get to? You’re right they learn to open locks faster than parents usually realize!
I have 3 houdini children who mastered locks before they were 1. Cleaning supplies are kept in the cabinet above the washing machine. So far, that has worked (The will climb the fridge, but not the washer).
Thanks for sharing! We actually just moved to a new house this weekend, so are organizing everything from scratch. I now have 3 kids too so I will definitely use your tip!