Four Best Tips for Organizing Kitchen Cabinets
By Natalie MorrisRefacingCabinet.com Columnist
No matter how spacious your kitchen, you may still struggle to find enough cabinet space for all of the frying pans, serving bowls, sippy cups, spice racks, canned soup, Tupperware containers, and other required kitchen stuff that takes on a life of its own. Organizing your kitchen cabinets--and keeping them organized--can make the most of the space you've got and help you find what you need when you need it. But where to start?
1. Purge Your Kitchen Cabinets
Give yourself a do-over and start organizing your kitchen cabinets from scratch. Take everything, yes everything, out of your cabinets and sort by category. Typical categories could include pots and pans, food preparation, food storage, food serving, and more.
As you're sorting, set aside items that you no longer need, like, or use. A good rule of thumb to remember: if you haven't used something in two years, get rid of it or at least move it into a storage area.
2. Organize Your Cabinets by Zone
Once you've sorted through everything, create a plan to store your items by category and zone. Do not put anything back in the cabinets until you have a plan.
Where you keep things strongly depends on the layout of your cabinets, but storing items close to where you use them makes the most sense. For example, keep pots, pans, and cooking utensils next to the stove and store dishes and silverware next to dishwasher.
3. Keep Your Most Used Items Within Reach
Save prime cabinet real estate for the things you use every day or even multiple times each day: the toaster, your favorite coffee mug, a pen and notepad. Know your established habits and create your organization system around that. You can go crazy running back and forth to the pantry for salt and pepper if you cook with it all the time.
4. Divide and Conquer the Small Stuff
Every kitchen attracts small stuff. Some of it belongs in the space--silverware, corn-on-the-cob holders, meat thermometers--and some of it technically does not. Creating subcategories for the smaller items and physically dividing or containing them goes a long way to keeping your kitchen cabinets organized.
This strategy can transform the way you look at Tupperware containers and the junk drawer present in most kitchens. Micro organizing can turn that "junk" into a useful drawer of things you need instead of one big sea of messiness. Insert special drawer dividers, do some purging, and you may be shocked by the change.
Organizing kitchen cabinets won't change the look of your kitchen but the process can change the way you function in the space. A little bit of elbow grease and planning and you may feel like you have a whole new kitchen!
About The Author
Natalie Morris is a freelance writer who loves to learn and ask questions. Her favorite home improvement activities include gardening, organizing, and painting large expanses of wall while her husband does the trim work. Natalie holds a bachelor's degr
