Clean and Organize Your Kitchen

Welcome to the beginning of the “Clean and Tidy” series.

I look forward to sharing ideas and tips for cleaning and organizing your home in simple, easy to follow steps. Life is already so busy and complicated, it’s time to focus more on your family and spend less time cleaning house! Are you ready to begin?

In this series I will be choosing 1 room a month to focus our energy on. (occasionally a room will need more or less time than that). But for now we are going to start with…..

The KITCHEN

(Week 1)

That’s right, probably one of the most daily used rooms in the house! Which means it gets messy fast and cluttered easily! Believe me when I tell you that when your kitchen is organized: meal planning, finding things for cooking and keeping your pantry stocked is so much easier and therefore you spend less time running to the store or trying to find something for dinner (aka eating out too much!). So getting your kitchen in order is where we need to start! Without further ado….let’s begin!

Here is a picture of my Kitchen before I began….

First we need to begin by analyzing our space, follow these steps:

Step 1. Walk around your kitchen, from one side to the other, and write down any problem areas.(areas where things pile up, unorganized spaces, areas that need attention).

Here’s my list:

– Counter tops: Bread, Fresh fruits and Veggies, Misc. Papers and Mail

– Cupboards: Pots and Pans, Lids, Utensil Drawers, Spice Cabinet, Vitamins

– Pantry: Recycling, Cluttered

*Here are pictures of these areas in my kitchen (a little embarrassing)…

(Yes my pantry gets this bad, it probably needs the most help, don’t ya think!)

Step 2. Now get some ideas for organizing those problem areas! It helps if you write each issue down and then search some ideas online or think of ways to easily organize your space. Make a list of items you may need to execute your solution.

Here are some solutions I came up with for my Problem Areas:

– Counter tops:

o Bread – Store in Pantry, Need: Basket

o Fresh Fruits and Veggies – Store in Pantry, Need: Bins

o Papers/Mail – New Station for paper sorting. Need: Bins

– Cupboards:

o Pots and Pans – Shelving in cabinet for better stacking

o Lids – 2 Wall mounted lid sorters

o Utensil Drawers – trays for organizing

o Spice Cabinet – Wall mounted shelving in pantry for some spices, trays for cabinet with regularly used spices

o Vitamin cabinet – Lazy Susan, bins

– Pantry

o Recycling – box for cans/plastic

o Cluttered – throw out unused stuff, organize by categories, more shelving, re-organize, bins for storing small stuff

To see my other Kitchen Organizing Posts go here… Part 2, Part 3, & Part 4

*Here are a couple websites that have great Kitchen & Pantry Organizing Ideas…

Organizing Homelife

Fabulously Organized Home

Domestic Imperfection

Check out more great ideas on my “Kitchen Ideas” board on Pinterest.

I know, That was a lot of work! But trust me, if you find permanent solutions for these problem areas you will no longer have the mess/clutter and your kitchen will function how it is supposed to! You will spend less time cleaning the kitchen when everything has a home. So spend this coming week following these steps. Purchase any items you are going to need for your problem areas and find what works best to fix them. Tune in next week when we will be focusing on cleaning up the kitchen and putting our solutions to the test!

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Happy Organizing!

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