This will not be very interesting to anyone but me, but I do enjoy a good day of organization. Any time I find myself feeling annoyed with the amount of space (or lack thereof) in our house, I try to think about how to reuse the space in better ways. If you need some organization inspiration, head over to
I Heart Organizing . Check out her project gallery for some ideas...I love that website!
I made a list of all the areas in our house that I wanted to work on over the break and funnily enough, the kitchen did not make that list. However, somehow I ended up spending a couple of hours cleaning and reorganizing our kitchen yesterday.
I always felt like we did not have enough cabinet space in our kitchen, but after snapping some pictures of the cabinets, it was easy to see that space was not the issue; they were just messy and disorganized.
This is one of the problems in our house, things start out organized but when we are in a hurry, we tend to just throw things wherever and over time, that clutters everything up.
We have a huge cabinet over our kitchen sink that was not being used well. There was too much stuff in it and some items, like to-go coffee mugs, had to be crammed wherever I could find a space.
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For this cabinet, I moved less used items to a different cabinet or to the highest shelf. Since we use tupperware everyday for lunches, I moved them from a slide out cabinet (picture below) in our pantry to this easy-access cabinet. Like! Before, our tupperware lids were taking over the world. Now they are tucked inside a container inside the cabinet and are much more contained.
We have a huge, deep cabinet above our refrigerator. I hardly ever go in it and it can be hard to access things in the back (I may need to invest in a foldable step stool). Pretty much the only time I used this cabinet was to get out a vase every now and again. It was a huge waste not to be using this cabinet for storage in a more effective way.
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First I cleaned the cabinet out and then moved less used items to it, like baking pans and serving ware. This is a good cabinet for those bulky items that I don't use as often. It's not a very dramatic "after" shot, but it does reflect more thoughtful organizing in terms of what is stored there now!
We also have a large cabinet above the microwave that was in need of attention. Again, I took everything out of the cabinet and gave it a good scrub down.
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One of the problems with this cabinet was that I couldn't see everything easily. Because the cabinet is not at eye-level, it was often hard to see all the canned goods. Also, there was a hodgepodge of overflow tupperware in this cabinet and miscellaneous boxes of tea.
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We have two cabinet shelves from IKEA that were not being used effectively before. Now, I moved them both to the top shelf to help display items that are very high up. Now that I can see everything, I won't be buying repeat items by mistake anymore!
The last cabinet that I reorganized was pretty atrocious. People usually have a "junk drawer". This was the equivalent to a junk cabinet.
This cabinet held some meds, lint rollers, some cleaning supplies, lunch boxes, and paper plates. And they were all out of control. This was the cabinet that you would open and hope that nothing fell out onto your head.
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I pretty much got a whole empty shelf out of this one! I moved all the cleaning products to our cleaning caddy in the laundry room, so that freed up a lot of space. Garbage bags went under the sink. All plastic cups, plates, and utensils went up together on the top shelf. I can breathe again...
Reorganizing the kitchen cabinets was mostly about being more thoughtful about where things were placed. High-use items needed to go to more easily accessed cabinets. Lesser used items got moved to the storage shelves in the basement, a different cabinet, or the Goodwill pile.
Little changes like this make me so much happier to live in our house. Have a happy Friday!
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