Let’s be honest with ourselves for a second.
We’ve all been idly swiping through Instagram, looking for home decoration ideas (or maybe just some cute footage of a dog, who knows), when you start to notice everyone’s kitchen. How everyone else seems like they just have the most perfect, functional, well-organized kitchen in the world, and yours just…isn’t?
First of all, you should probably stop comparing yourself to those perfect social media kitchens, because it doesn’t look like that in real life, they just have to make it pretty for the camera (like we all do). That said, there absolutely are some tips and tricks for kitchen organization that you might not have worked into your own daily routine yet! While we can’t promise you’ll suddenly be going viral with these tips, we do think you’ll be much happier with how your kitchen looks when it’s done.
Tips and Inspiration for a Well-Organized Kitchen
Creating A Good Layout
While there’s only so much you can do about the design of your kitchen (unless you’re about to spend a ton of money on new cabinets), there are absolutely ways to make sure you’re using the space you have in the right way.
Take a look around your kitchen, and see if everything is where it should be. When you’re cooking, do you frequently have to look around for just the right sized spatula or ladle? Maybe try moving your most-used cooking utensils into the drawer closest to the oven! Try keeping your pots and pans closest to the stove, and use the cabinets closer to your counter or island for plates and glassware. However you rearrange your cookware, make sure to focus on the areas where you’ll be most productive!
Using Different Storage for Different Needs
Just like you wouldn’t put milk in a cabinet, or chips in a freezer, everything you keep in a kitchen has an ideal place to be kept. Closed storage, such as built-in cabinets, are perfect for items that might be a little more breakable (plates, bowls, glasses), or items you don’t need to reach for all the time, such as snacks or dry goods. The things you use more often, like utensils, cookware, and spices, should be kept in more open kitchen storage like baker’s racks and kitchen carts to keep them safe and close at hand.
Streamlining Food
If you fancy yourself a cook (or simply someone who loves a good meal), you might have the same reaction to this advice as book lovers had to Marie Kondo’s suggestions for trimming down their home libraries. We promise, you don’t have to keep less ingredients around, but there are ways to store them more effectively!
For starters, always practice a ‘first in, first out’ method with food to make sure nothing sticks around past its expiration date, and to make sure you’re not accidentally wasting money and space on duplicates of something that’s still fresh and ready to use. This will keep the stuff that’s about to spoil right in front so it can be used up before moving onto something else!
Getting rid of bulky packaging can help too – if you’re industrious enough to transfer your food into jars or other containers, you can really maximize your cabinet space by taking away all the bulky boxes or bottles many foods come in.
Using Vertical Space
A lot of people will organize their drawers and cabinets and call it done from there, but there’s still a lot of space that can be used in your kitchen! By using the walls of your kitchen, either with hooks or wire wall shelving, you can store goods you access more frequently, longer cooking tools that don’t quite fit anywhere else, or just stuff you use often enough to not hide it behind a cabinet door. Not feeling up to mounting anything directly to the wall? Taller shelving units like rust proof wire shelves can store these goods up against the wall while still keeping them freely accessible!
While these tips might not give you that dream kitchen you saw on TikTok, they will give you a much more organized and usable kitchen – and at the end of the day, isn’t that the real dream kitchen?
(Okay, okay, other than the one made out of six figures’ worth of real marble.)