Hi everyone! The kitchen is the hub of a home and an organised kitchen can really help you in so many ways if you have a busy life!
An organised kitchen allows you to see exactly what you have so that you are not wasting money buying duplicates, wasting time shopping in the first place if you don’t need to and it will help you plan meals.
A good functioning kitchen will allow you to place your hands on what you need, when you need it and it’s safer if you have small children about too.
Not only that but an organised kitchen looks good!
Recently I got to grips with a kitchen cabinet in a client’s home. Here was the customary before shot:
As you can see, a good size press. It wasn’t too deep so there’d be no problems to overcome in that department. It just wasn’t fit for purpose. The main problems were:
- Too many items for the space
- Items too big for the shelves
- Mix of items with different uses in the one spot
- Containers that weren’t being used to their potential
- Poorly labelled storage
The first thing I did was to empty out the cabinet and I gave it wipe down. It’s much easier to declutter a space when you clear it first and start with a blank canvas.
Of the items that came out of the cabinet, I got rid of anything that was too old, out of date, broken or that the client didn’t want anymore.
Then I looked at the main items that came out of the cabinet. It was mainly baking goods and as I always want to stick with current habits as much as possible, I decided that I would keep baking as a primary function of this cabinet.
I placed the baking items that I was keeping back in and looked at how much room they took up. It wasn’t too much, so I looked around the rest of the kitchen for other baking paraphernalia and added those items in here too. I was creating a ‘zone’ of baking here and when you’re doing that you have to bring all relative items together.
The other dominant items found were dried foodstuffs such as cereals, rice, porridge, sugars etc. Some of these food items fit nicely in with my ‘baking’ zone such as flour and sugar.
I decided that all baking equipment would go on the bottom of the shelf. While the upper shelf would take any baking goods plus other dried food items.
I was creating a ‘zone’ of baking here and when you’re doing that you have to bring all relative items together.
I placed the food items on the top shelf as these items would be accessed most often and so needed the easiest to access to.
Each shelf now had a clear function – baking and dried food.
Finally, I looked at storage. There were a lot of different containers when I cleared the press out and some were too old to re-use. While others, such as the glass and plastic jars were perfect but not being used at all! So flour, sugar, cereal etc were decanted into this nice storage.
I added in an IKEA lazy susan on the top shelf so that all the jars and baking goods could be spun around on this and easily accessed.
While on bottom I added a shelf insert which gave me twice as much space on the bottom shelf than before.
I also used the new labels from IKEA on the jars which marks clearly what’s inside each jar.
Et viola! Here is how it looked after…
A well organised cabinet, it’s clear, clean with matching storage solutions. Everything in the cabinet is visible and easily accessible. It’s so important when organising to remember to keep ‘easy retrieval’ as one of your main goals!
Happy Organising!
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