A good place to start cleaning your kitchen is to arrange the kitchen drawers. They are not often seen (provided they can close!) But are usually responsible for the vast majority of our clutter.
Do you open your drawers and find a messy mess? When you open the cutlery box, are you faced with a tangled mess of silverware, napkins and seemingly random objects?
In addition to being able to keep our trash and allow for further disorganization, cluttered kitchen drawers can waste time looking through them in search of all we need. Being disorganized also hides the drawers and makes it harder to get rid of clutter. if we can not put everything out and see what we have, we are more likely to keep everything in the boxes and try not to worry about it – but we can fix it quickly and easily!
First, there are some general guidelines to help you decide what to keep and what to get rid of or move to a new storage space. This is based on how long it has been since you used an item:
More than a year: Get rid of that mess! If more than a year has passed, there should be no reason to keep it.
Almost a year: You should probably look into getting rid of whatever it is – but you may want to keep it if it is used for vacation. These items can be safely moved from the “active” part of your kitchen and stored somewhere more long-term if only used annually.
6 months: Again, you probably want to look at getting rid of these things if there is no recurring date that happens a few times a year.
1 month: These items must be reviewed in order for a decision to be made. Maybe they can be moved to a more long-term storage space if they are in a “high traffic” box. Some of these items may also need to be discarded.
1 day to 1 week: These items are the most important part of your kitchen and should be placed in the drawers that are easiest to access and closest to where they are used. These are the things like cutlery, salt and pepper, mixer etc.
Start with the box you use the most. For most of us, this will be the box of silver. Follow these steps to organize your cutlery:
Empty the box
Wipe the inside so that you start with a clean box
Get a cutlery holder to separate and keep the utensils in order
If you do not have one or do not want to buy one, use a small box, cardboard strips or other method to make dividers that keep your various tools separate.
Decide where the remaining items should go: do you need to keep everything that was in the box? Can it go with other similar items, or does it have to be donated or thrown away?
This simple act of organizing your cutlery box can save time and possible hand injuries. I have spit my finger a few times on knives and forks in drawers – doing it a few times has made me a lifelong lover of cutlery holders!
Tupperware / plastic container
Most of us use almost all kinds of small to medium sized storage containers almost daily. These can be used to pack lunches, store leftovers or prepared dinners. Put these containers in boxes or shelves that are easily accessible and stack them on their own. What does this mean? This means taking as a container and nesting them on top of similar containers and doing the same with the lids. This will save some space and get similar items grouped together.
Spices
If you do not have a spice rack or do not want to take up space on your kitchen surfaces, you can store the spices in a drawer. There are scaffolding you can make to divide these, but with most kitchens there are a variety of spice container sizes and it can be difficult to find the right one for you.
What would work better is to put the spices in the box you want them and then make, or find, long dividers to keep the spice containers in the configuration you have them in. This can be done with cardboard strips, sections of thin plastic or other similar materials.
Opener / skewer / grill tool
Putting different types of openers, skewers and barbecue equipment in one drawer can help free your other drawers with sharp and poignant tools that can hook a hand while you rummage around. Although this is not intended to be a catch box, it can help consolidate some of the less used items that may be a hazard. These articles may include:
canned opener
bottle opener
skewer for kabob
pliers
spatlar
wine bottle opener
egg slicer
grater
Odds and Ends box
It may seem like it goes against the idea of getting rid of clutter, but I think every kitchen needs a drawer that can capture the odds and ends that are really useful but do not fit into any other drawer. The trick is to make sure this does not become an overfilled container that everything you can not decide on goes into.
A good idea is to look at what is in the box when you go to put something in it and apply
