TECHNOTES: Organizing Your Kitchen

Last week we looked at some good ideas for organizing and personalizing your office.  This week we’ll look at ideas for organizing your kitchen.  Don’t forget to have your family help you, that way they’ll be more bought in to keeping things organized!

Organizing Your Kitchen

Organizing your kitchen helps if you divide it into sections.  Focus on one area at a time and set the time you plan on spending on that area.  When the time is done, stop.  The next day, work on another section within that area.

Dividing the kitchen into bitesize sections makes organizing your kitchen much more palatable (pardon the puns) and fun.

SMALL APPLIANCES

Where do you put all of your appliances?  Before we talk about organizing your kitchen appliances, let’s look at how to handle those annoying dangling cords.  Here’s a clever way to keep cords out of the way. 

If you use appliances every day, keep them where you use them. But if you don’t need them on the counter, store them in the pantry for a roomier and less cluttered kitchen.

Don’t have a walk-in pantry? No problem, you can reassign a kitchen cabinet to an appliance center, complete with accessories.

If you want to use a lower cabinet, which is typically deeper, rollout shelves are ideal for small appliances to you don’t need to dig to the back to find the one you’re looking for.

FOODS

Organizing your kitchen for food storage can be tough.  We all love shopping at Costco but where do you put all the extra packages you won’t need for awhile?

Wish you had more food storage? Don’t have a pantry, extra cabinets, any any space?  How about that guest closet or a bedroom closet near the kitchen? Really, how often do you use it, just once in awhile, right?   Time to repurpose it!

I’m a big fan of using clear glass jars to store essentials like flour, sugars, rice, popcorn kernels, lentils, and more. I also use OXO plastic seal-tight food storage containers for flax seed, protein mixes, cereal, noodles, chips, crackers, and more.

Adhering clear caddies to your pantry wall helps to organize pouched items like sauces, gravies, and drink mixes.

What about all of those spice bottles? I find a drawer works best!  Organizing your kitchen can actually be fun once you come up with ideas on how you can do it.

ACCESSORIES

Accessories or things that work with other things to help you cook can be tough to know what to do with them when organizing your kitchen.

Lids are often cumbersome and hard to store, but ideally, you’d like to store them near their pots.  Here’s a smart idea using a tension rod to organize them in a drawer with your pots.

Cutting boards are a staple at any meal I prepare.  I like having them closeby to where I chop.  Storing cutting boards behind a cupboard door is brilliant.  Same goes for foil and Saran Wrap!

Keep measuring spoons and cups out of the way with this clever solution.

And of course, food storage containers.  You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.  My storage container area is always a mess.  Here’s how to keep your unruly food storage containers ruly.

Don’t forget the technology for your kitchen to help you with tasks.   We use the Google Home to help with recipe conversions, add items to our shopping list as we run out, listen to music while cooking, and ask what certain recipe terms are, like how to blanch, scald, and poach.

Plugs can be at a premium in a kitchen too, but you need a good outlet to charge your phone without getting in the way of power for your small appliances.  Install this quick and easy wall outlet to multitask your power outlets.

We hope this gives you some food for thought in organizing your kitchen.  Next week, we’ll cover organizing your garage!