Kitchen Organization: The Ultimate Guide to Maximizing Space and Minimizing Clutter

Knowing how to organize kitchen space can be a daunting challenge. Your kitchen is one of the most used rooms in the home. Whether you’re cleaning dishes, making a meal, or eating with friends and family, the kitchen handles a lot of foot traffic every day. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s great because so many people get to appreciate your kitchen, but bad because a location with high traffic tends to collect more clutter. 

Bring some clarity to your home by reorganizing your kitchen and cutting back on the clutter. Even if your kitchen is relatively clean, there’s never a bad time to get the most out of your space and reduce waste along the way. 

How to Declutter the Kitchen: Start by Sorting

Sorting is the act of placing items of similar type together to better organize your space. Many items in the kitchen can be paired with similar items, such as plates, silverware, and food in their own piles. Once these piles have been sorted and set, you can begin moving them around to areas that make the most sense. Dishes and cups can go in cupboards, silverware can go in drawers, and food in the pantry, refrigerator, and shelves. 

When you start the process, pull all the items from your shelves and drawers until they are completely bare. Once everything is out, gather them together into piles based on categories, like tools, plates, or food in their own groups. Then go pile by pile to determine if there are any items that can be thrown away or donated to save space. These items can be moved aside to give you a better picture of what is staying around. 

Organize After Sorting the Kitchen

When thinking about how to organize kitchen space, many times, people will purchase organizational items before they start the organizing process, realizing later that they don’t need some of these items since they have more space than they thought. Always sort your kitchen out before getting organizational items like dividers, extra shelves, or additional tubs. You may have more room than you thought and if you jump the gun, you’re only creating more clutter for yourself. 

Additionally, you can create storage space out of thin air by utilizing hangers for glasses or kitchenware, magnetic shelving on the refrigerator for smaller elements like spices, and bowls to hold things like fruit. These not only give the room a more modern look, but they give you more space to sort your items. 

Efficiency is the Key to Success

Cabinets are some of the best storage spaces in the kitchen that are often improperly used. Cabinets are tall and vertical, meaning that they often feel more cramped than they are. We have a tendency to stack things horizontally when in this case, they should be stacked vertically. Use risers to stack dishes more efficiently and keep them separated, then use separators to keep elements like glassware and other supplies in their own areas. Utilize the deepness of your cabinets to place items further back instead of surface level. 

Try using multifunctional organizers like washbasins as dryers or utensil stands that support cookbooks too. The more efficiently you can organize your space, the less hassle you need to go through to find what you need during the meal process. 

Buying in Bulk and Reviewing Your Kitchen

While buying in bulk is cost-effective, it’s not conducive to a clutter-free home if you don’t have the space to store everything. Buying bags of rice goes a long way if you often cook with it, but if it simply takes up space in the cupboard or basement then it isn’t contributing much beyond taking up space. 

Before you make any purchases, ensure you are completely or nearly out of the item and have enough space to effectively store it without overflowing or taking up additional space. While you’re at it, review your kitchen to see if you have anything past its prime that needs to be replaced, assess your kitchenware to see if anything is going unused for too long, and throw out or donate anything that is contributing to clutter. 

Kitchen Cleaning Made Easy

When it comes time to assess the state of your kitchen and start making changes to your organizational strategy, Tranquil Transitions can help. We help provide assessments and oversights for your decluttering efforts, providing you with the guidance to effectively begin the decluttering process and organize your kitchen while you work. If you’re ready to tackle your kitchen clutter once and for all, Tranquil Transitions is just a call away.