Hello, welcome! Thank you so much for being here.

Today I’m sharing my tips and tricks for organizing your kitchen.

The kitchen is the heart of the home. We gather around food daily. We celebrate special occasions and holidays with food. Food brings people together.

Some of my fondest childhood memories revolved around the kitchen. Mixing meatloaf together with my bare hands under my mother’s supervision. My father’s homemade mint chocolate chip cookies. Sipping hot cocoa around a newly lit Christmas tree.

And now, whenever the kids return home with our families, there is always a feast. 

Since the kitchen is such a vital part of home life, it should be easy to navigate, fun to use, and not an anxiety.

Keep reading if you need some pointers on how to make your kitchen run smoothly and have it be a place you want to work in to serve your family.

Part I: Goals

What are you hoping to achieve with this space?

Before you hop right on into the task of emptying out every single cabinet in your kitchen, take the time to jot down the hopes you have for this space. Do you want your time in the kitchen to be spent efficiently? Are you looking forward to cute organizational containers? If so, what are you willing to spend on those aesthetic pieces? Are you hoping to free up counter space? Write it all down here.

Having a clear cut idea of what you’re hoping to achieve will help your productivity when you enter the action phase (part III). We don’t want to be organizing the kitchen for days since you use this space at least three times a day.

Part II: Strategize

What is your plan of action?

Let’s create a quick, simple action plan that will make your day of reorganization much easier. Notice that we still haven’t touched anything in our cupboards. Following this step will ensure your organization day runs smoothly and efficiently.

Here are a few ideas to take into consideration when reorganizing your kitchen:

1. Foot traffic

2. Counter space

3. Where you prep your meals

4. Where your goods and tools are in relation to the stove/oven

Take into account the natural flow of your kitchen. Where do you do most of your prep work for dinner? Where does your sourdough starter live? Evaluate your cabinets and shelves around these main work areas. Are your measuring cups and spoons near your baking station? Are your spices and oils close to the stove? We’re trying to eliminate walking across the kitchen because your garlic press is in the drawer on the other side of the room instead of the drawer by the stove.

When planning out your cabinet organization, start with the items you use the most. Make sure they are within easy reach according to daily or weekly access. For example, I use my flour nearly everyday with my sourdough starter. However, I don’t use canned goods daily, so I put those in a more inconvenient place.

If you’re planning on purchasing jars for your reorganization, get out the tape measure to make sure they’ll fit. You can even plan precisely what will be put in each jar. (I did this.)

Once you have a detailed plan in place, then you can finally start the heavy lifting.

Part III: Action

Empty out all the spaces you’re looking to organize. Dump it all on your dining table, wipe out the now vacant cabinets, and then begin your reorganization according to your detailed plan from step II.

This step may include transferring dry goods from bags to labeled jars. Maybe you gather similar products into one bigger basket. Maybe you’re just relocating your kitchen tools and goods to places that will make you more efficient.

It’s like solving a giant puzzle. You’re putting the pieces together to make the kitchen a space you want to work in and serve your family from.

My Kitchen Organization Journey

Part 1

When organizing my kitchen, I tried to make that space as efficient as possible. I didn’t want to be walking back-and-forth and back-and-forth the entire time I cooked dinner or baked scones. 1) it’s tiring and 2) it’s time consuming. Even though I wanted my time in the kitchen spent efficiently, I also wanted my cupboards to look cute when I opened them. My final goal was to clear up some counter space.

Part II

Keeping my goals in mind, I devised an incredibly detailed plan of action.

We have this deep cabinet, fashioned into the corner of our kitchen and it housed our baking items (flours, sugars, spices, etc.). The problem being that this cabinet is five feet away from the baking counter and all of my flours and sugars were on the very top shelf. It wasn’t very efficient to have to cart down every container and carry it over to the counter, using multiple trips, to then start baking.

The cabinets above our baking counter were being used as a catch-all pantry that haphazardly housed dry, canned, and bulk goods. I devised a strategy of converting the lower shelves above the baking counter into housing my baking ingredients, the middle shelves would house my dry goods, and the top shelves would hold the less used canned goods.

Before emptying any cupboards, I went to the extreme of planning exactly what dry goods would go into which new, cute storage jars. I also took time here to create the labels for my glass spice jars.

Part III

I split this step over two days. The first day I transferred all of my spices into my labeled, glass spice jars. The true overhaul of the kitchen began on day two.

I emptied three different cabinets onto our dining table, wiped out the cupboards, and began transferring dried goods and baking items into cute containers. This did take time, but would have been much more overwhelming if I hadn’t had a plan to go off of.

I was so happy with the result of my reorganization, that I left those cabinets open nearly the entire day just to keep my hard efforts in view as I flitted in and out of the kitchen.

The kitchen is the heart of the home. Hopefully this post helped you understand how to cultivate that space into a room that’s a stress free environment, fun to use, and easy to navigate.

Thank you so much for your time!