9 Steps to Organizing Your Kitchen

You're in your kitchen all the time. If you're like most people, that kitchen of yours gets used more often than most other areas in your home. So it makes sense that organizing your kitchen would make your life easier. Here's a guide to getting your kitchen organized.

Step 1: Empty Your Cabinets

White kitchen cabinets with glass doorsWhat? I hear you saying it. That sounds like a lot of work. Well, how did you expect to get organized without starting with the basic?

Get everything out of the cabinets and go through it. Do you have duplicate items? Things you hardly ever use? How about broken kitchen gadgets? Then there's the things you actually forgot you had.

Go through every drawer and cabinet and group everything on the floor. Take a serious look and decide what you can get rid of. Remember that your kitchen is short on space and the goal is to pare down to things you actually use and love, and to ditch the rest.

Step 2: Group Things Together

Sort your kitchen into groups by category. Go through each group on the ground. Gather your baking items together. Get your cooking utensils into one group. Have items that only get occasional use, such as special holiday dishware? Get those all together too.

Step 3: Get Organized

Now that you only have the items you really need organized into groups, you need to put them into their proper places. Put your coffee making supplies near the coffeemaker. Store your kitchen utensils near the area you use them. Consider the location to your dishwasher as well. You don't want to walk and forth across the kitchen to put aware a dishwasher full of glassware you use everyday. Make things as convenient as possible.

Step 4: Get Some Containers

Using containers makes a huge difference in corralling your various packages of gravy mixes and other little seasoning envelopes. Some inexpensive plastic storage containers (even plastic shoe boxes) can keep them from getting scattered all over your cabinet. Don't forget one for little boxes like pudding mix and flavored gelatin too.

Step 5: Get Control of Lids

If you're like many people, you see to acquire an uneven number of lids and plastic containers. How do we end up with lids without containers and containers without lids? Get rid of everything that doesn't have a fitting partner. Store them in a larger container to keep them all together. Do the same with your pots and pans.

Add a lazy susan to your kitchen cabinetsStep 6: Use Lazy Susans

Take full advantage of hard to reach corners in the back of cabinets with built in lazy susans. Lazy susans can be built into cabinets making reaching awkward corners a snap. They can be used in unexpected places too, like your fridge, making it easy to each items in the back, or your upper cabinets, to hold medications or spices.

Step 7: Add Drawer Dividers

Dividing your drawers makes it easy to assign everything a spot. Even that junk drawer can get organized and you'll be able to find things when you need them.

Step 8: Paperwork

Let's talk about that pile of paperwork you've been acquiring. From takeout menus and coupons to various notepads, it all tends to accumulate on your countertop. Then you bring in the mail for a few days and - Yikes! Paperwork explosion. That's not being organized.

Adding a kitchen desk with a file drawer can make it easy to keep on top of paperwork. No room for a kitchen desk? Look for magnetic sorter boxes you can stick to the side of your fridge. Keeping paperwork sorted makes it easy to find what you're looking for, and keeping it off your counters will inspire you to stay organized.

Step 9: Clean Out the Fridge

Oh you. You KNEW it was coming but you didn't want to face it. There's always something lurking in the back, isn't there? Okay, maybe that's just me. We can't ignore the refrigerator in this kitchen organization so get some trash bags and get started.

Try and make a habit of cleaning out your fridge once a week. Does your trashman pick up every week? Cleaning out your fridge the night before is a good reminder to get out anything that needs to be tossed.

Speaking of trash, I like to put the extra trash bags in the bottom of the trash can. Take out the trash and your new bag is right there, exactly where you need it.