Welcome to Day Twelve of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series! I'm so glad you've joined me. Throughout this series I'll be sharing organizing ideas that I've found around the web that I love and that will help you on your journey from overwhelmed to organized. You'll find a complete list of all the posts in the 31 Days of Organizing Tips tab above, or at the end of this post.
Today's tips are about organizing your kitchen. We've already looked at organizing your pantry and your refrigerator, which are important elements of your kitchen. Today I'll give some tips for other parts of your kitchen and summarize why it's important to keep your kitchen organized.
Your kitchen is often the hub of your family life. You prepare meals there, eat there, do homework there, create art projects there, and countless other things. Sometimes kitchens take a lot of abuse :) They also can become the dumping ground for anything that comes into the house or for things that don't have a specific place to go. Counters, tables, and other surfaces become easily cluttered.
So, having an organized kitchen will hopefully help you stay on top of things, so you are less overwhelmed and can enjoy spending more time with your family in your kitchen!
A lot of general organizing tips that I've already mentioned in this series apply in the kitchen. Grouping like items is very important, as is using containers to organize. And, of course, don't forget to de-clutter when you organize your kitchen! Kitchens are a magnet for stuff we don't really need, use, or love :)
As you start organizing your kitchen, consider the following:
- Where you use things and what items you use together (store them accordingly)
- How often you use items (keep frequently used things in central locations but don't take up "prime real estate" for things you don't use very often)
Here are a couple of links to blogs that give several kitchen organizing tips:
- Andrea from Simple Organized Living is nearing the end of a full kitchen renovation to create her dream kitchen and it's been fun to follow her journey through the process and see how so many of her decisions were based on what would help her keep her kitchen organized. This is a picture of her old kitchen {which is beautiful and looks like a dream kitchen already!}. In the link below she discusses how an organized kitchen can save you time, money, stress, sanity, and space {sounds good to me!}.
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| 5 reasons to organize your kitchen |
- Katie from Kitchen Stewardship actually had Andrea come to her house to give her tips on organizing her kitchen. All this week, Katie is blogging about how she's implementing Andrea's tips. This particular post lists Katie's 10 renditions of Andrea's tips. My favourite is the counter is not "away" (this is her counter after she organized - it's much better than her before picture!). I need to work on that rule :)
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| Top 10 do-it-now tips for organizing your kitchen |
Here are some specific tips on how you can organize various parts of your kitchen:
1. Use a vertical organizer to keep your bakeware and pots and pans divided. This is better than stacking them because you don't have to move all of them when you want to use the one on the bottom {and why is it always the bottom one we need?!}. You can find similar wire shelf dividers here.
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| Bakeware Organizing |
2. Or, you can screw a bakeware organizer into your cabinet horizontally to separate these items. You can use these for lids too.
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| Stacking pans |
3. If you have a tall space between shelves, use under-the-shelf baskets or wire stand-alone shelves to maximize that space without having to stack items.
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| Top ten helper shelf hot-spots |
4. If you have a kitchen "junk drawer" (come on... be honest now... you know you do!), you can keep it organized by grouping like items into containers. You can purchase drawer organizers, dividers, and trays from nearly anywhere (including office supply stores and of course dollar stores). Or you can make your own by re-purposing plastic food containers, cardboard boxes or lids, or adding wooden dividers.
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| Ten ways to organize the small stuff |
5. Utensil drawers work the same way. Instead of having one big drawer with utensils floating around in it, group items and put them into containers or utensil organizers.
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| Source: http://www.plan-and-organize-life.com/kitchenorganization.html |
Thanks to all these great ladies for sharing their tips, printables, and pictures!
Please remember to pin from the original source for all these fantastic pictures! I'm happy to share them with you but I should not get credit for them :)
Update: If you'd like more kitchen organizing ideas, I've got a whole series of posts on kitchen organizing tips and you can see how I organized my kitchen.
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| Kitchen Organizing Tips Series |
I'll continue to add inspirational ideas and tips to my Kitchen Organizing board on Pinterest so follow me there for more ideas!
For Day Twelve, organize the part of your kitchen that bothers you the most. Or spend some time evaluating what works and what doesn't work in your kitchen and put together a plan for how to organize it better so it works for you. Kitchens are unique so don't feel overwhelmed with all the amazing ideas out there. Figure out your needs and organize your space to suit you!
Tomorrow we'll continue looking at tips for organizing various spaces in your home.
And just a reminder that as the series progresses, I'll be sharing tips for various organizing challenges. Feel free to leave a comment with any particular areas you'd like me to cover. I look forward to going through this series with you and hearing your tips too!
What do you think is the greatest benefit of organizing your kitchen? What's the best organizing tip you've implemented?
Have a great day and happy organizing!
Here are all the posts in the series:
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