How to Organize Kitchen Cabinets

Organizing kitchen cabinets can provide a huge impact for simplifying your life in the kitchen. Here are some easy organizing tips to organize your kitchen cabinets.

The kitchen is, most often, the most used room in the entire home. It is used for meals, getting snacks and drinks, and sometimes to congregate. The kitchen is also the most important room of the home to keep clean. Because of this, organizing your kitchen makes a big impact to the entire household, and organizing kitchen cabinets is an ideal first step to organizing your kitchen.
Analyze the Kitchen Cabinet Storage Space

Activities performed in the kitchen are pretty standard: stove top cooking, baking, preparing food to cook, cleaning dishes, and sometimes being social, eating, and paying bills. To analyze the use of your kitchen cabinet storage, do the following:
 •Write down the activities you do in your kitchen
 •Next to each activity, write down which tools you use to perform each task.

Plan How the Kitchen Cabinets Will Be Used
Think “centers”: look at the activities that were written down and then designate the location where these activities will be performed. For example, designate the ‘food preparation center’, the ‘dish washing center’, ‘baking center,’ the ‘social center’ and so on.

Now, reference the tools used in these areas (which were previously written down). Assign these tools closest to their respective center. You can use a post-it note on the cabinet door or you can draw your cabinets on a piece of paper and then label the drawing. For example:
 •The cabinet closest to the coffee center can have the coffee cups, coffee, filters, sugar, and creamer
 •The cabinet closest to the baking center can have the flour, sugar, muffin cups, cookie cutters, and so on.

Note: while this is being planned out, keep the items that are used most frequently in the easiest place to access.

Get Kitchen Cabinet Organizers
After the upper cabinets and base cabinets have been designated with a purpose, kitchen cabinet organizers need to be purchased to avoid clutter from aimlessly collecting again. Items like lazy susans, tiered shelves, cup and plate racks, spice organizers, and pull out drawers make a huge difference in corralling, dividing, separating, and simplifying the storage of items.

Take Everything Out, Purge, and Put Back
This is where the actual physical work begins. If time is an issue, take a 'baby step' approach: work on one cabinet at a time. First take everything out of the cabinets, get rid of anything that is expired or anything that will never be used, and then have the cabinets prepared with the organizers that will keep your kitchen cabinets organized. Put everything back into the kitchen cabinets, paying attention to leaving frequently used items easiest to access, efficiently using the cabinet organizers, and designating a home for everything.

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